St Lawrence

We have just spent the last few days away in the coastal town of St Lawrence.

The kidlettes, my Mum and I left at about 1.30am and arrived about 11.30am, stopping in Rockhampton along the way to drop my Mum at her friend's place for a few days visit.

Once the kidlettes and I had breaky we headed off for the last couple of hours of the drive until we finally arrived to find Lovely Hubby waiting for us.

St Lawrence is a tiny coastal town which sort of defies logic.  In the post war years it was one of the most important towns in the whole of Queensland but now it's mainly known for it's fishing. 

 

There's really not a lot there except a pub (of course), an ancient general store, a post office and the regions council depot.

We really liked it though and got the chance to do quite a bit of exploring around the town and the area.  We stayed with Rob, a friend of Hubby's from work and would really have loved to have gone out in his boat.

There was a bit of a problem with it I think so we'll just have to wait until next time to go out and get a bit of really good fishing in.

 

When the tide's out in some of the local creeks, it really goes out.  You can see from the below picture just how far down the water is.  At high tide it's nearly up to the top of the bank that you can see opposite and the jetty then becomes level because of the blue floats underneath.

 

The kidlettes loved walking through the mangroves on the walkways exploring and just having fun being out and about.

 

Later that afternoon we headed back to the main river as the tide was starting to come in.  It's quite amazing to see it come in as it rushes so quickly and the sand banks are covered in what seems only minutes.  When the tide goes out it's described as someone pulling a plug out of a bath and the water goes down so quickly. 

Rob and Hubby did some fishing near the bridge, the kidlettes were on the lookout for crocodiles and I sat in my chair doing some crochet, watching the kidlettes have fun exploring and just enjoying the beautiful afternoon and sunset.

 

We also did some exploring further up the coast and went into some of the towns I knew about but had never been into.  In the 30 years or so we've been heading to North Queensland for family holidays, we've only ever driven straight past these towns on our way to our destination.

One place we did love was Carmilla Beach.  There's quite a sandy track before you get to the beach so we ended up putting the ute into 4WD as we didn't want to get bogged.

There's quite a few areas along the edge of the beach where you can camp for free for up to 3 nights and lots of people with caravans and camper trailers take advantage of this.

We drove right to the end of the track where no-one was camping as they probably didn't want to drive caravans that far in the sand.  I'm so glad we did continue to explore because we found the perfect spot for camping and all of us want to go back to there.

It's right on the beach so you can fish when the tides in and do plenty of exploring when it's out.  There's also a fantastic creek which would be perfect for putting the crab pots in and all you would have to do is walk down from your camp.  It was awesome!

 

We did some more exploring around the area checking out not only the coast but some of the inland places as well.

It was a really lovely few days and I really wish we had stayed for a bit longer.  We had to pick Mum up from her friend's in Rockhampton though, then we called into see my father-in-law who's living in Mt Larcom at the moment.  The kidlettes hadn't seen Grandad in a couple of months and they were so excited to see him.

With the couple of stops and the ridiculous amount of roadworks along the way (nearly 100km with no break), it ended up being a really long drive home.

If anyone's driving to Rockhampton during the day, add on an extra one and a half to two hours onto your trip because of the roadworks.  As I left early in the morning on the way up we weren't stopped every few kilometres as no one was working at 3-5am but coming home we really should have gone inland through Biloela.  It would've been such a better trip.

Enough of that though, it was a great couple of days and we would love to be heading up that was again soon. 

xx Susan