Fine? I’m not Fine with a Fine!

10th July 2012

 

Constantly kept waking last night by the rains, I was in decidedly a grumpy mood especially when I crept out of the Campervan to find even more rain. Here I am in Airlie Beach, gateway to the paradise of Whitsundays, and it’s truly and continuously pissing it down. Grabbing the teapot, and boiling it over the stove, Smera after her wash jumped in the front and preened herself in front of the rear view mirror when she froze. I carried on fussing over the teapot when I heard her shout out ‘Ed! We’ve got a fine!‘

 

She had reached round to find the fine fastened onto the windscreen wipers and pulled the cover off to find we had been illegally parked in a Government controlled Car Park. Feck. And more rain came down. More feck. I carried on pouring out the tea and in complete British stiff upper lip mode, I scrutinised the fine and its reasoning. And formulated arguments. We had bought a 24 hour ticket and nothing on the machine stated no campervans were allowed. We spotted a sign right on the other end of the car park, not visible where we parked that stated no camping was allowed. I was annoyed at the underhandedness of the fine setting. Why didn’t he knock on the door and explained. We would have been more than happy to have realised and moved on.

Airlie Beach was not proving popular with us. Especially with the rain.

We were gonna fight this. Ringing them up, we explained the situation who told us to send them an email and await a week before a reply would be made. We were happy with that. Never cross backpackers who need to fight to keep money to themselves!

 

Truly hacked off with Airlie Beach, we cut our losses, we weren’t going to stay here another night for more rain and possibly more fines, so we headed outta here!

 

Consulting the map, there’s literally nothing for us to do for a while so as it was raining, and lots of driving was needed. We called this the drive day. We knew the drive day would be upon us soon as the journey from Airlie Beach to Rockhampton would be an extremely long one.

 

So welcome guys, to a blog post of about a stupid fine and then now a blog about nothing but driving of 500km. What did we do in that journey?

 

1) Stopped twice for petrol

 

2) Read books and listened to Music

 

3) Played driving games such as alphabet games of boys and girls names. We realised how depressed we were and started dancing to music from the radio.

 

4) Realised from the only trivia game of the road that the highest mountain in Queensland is Mt Bartle Frere.

 

5) Arrived short of Rockhampton at Capricorn Caves Tourist Park. And rejoiced at the hot showers there!

 

6) Bed early as it was too busy raining!

 

Bloody rain. I’m not fine with a fine.

Grumble grumble.