Yamba to Hervey Bay - thanks to Tom!

Today we had a quick look around Yamba in daylight since we hadn’t had time to do that before. It is so flat with a marina full of fancy boats and then you come to the town and go up a steep hill where one would suspect the original shopping area was and there are still shops and restaurants but they have Yamba Fair shopping centre earlier on now. If you drive around at the top of the hill you realize it is a cliff with the ocean below. It was quite a view! I took some photos of course.

Well, we had a long way to drive so without further ado we headed off toward Ballina again since that is the way to Hervey Bay; back on Highway Number One! I took some photos through the windscreen of the cane fields flanking each side of the road and of the Big Prawn in Ballina. Yes, they really do have a big prawn. We saw the Big Banana in Coffs Harbour on our way through the other day and today we saw the Big Pineapple in Gympie but it looked rather closed.
The drive was OK except for when I decided to offer to drive since we were on the motorway and it was ‘dummy driving’, that is set the cruise (we love cruise control!) and steer basically, but then we got to Brisbane and I had to drive through town and the traffic was rather heavy there and onto the surrounding roads. Then we were back on the motorway saying, now where can we stop for lunch and a break? In the end I said we just have to stop ASAP so we pulled off to somewhere called Morayfield which is part of Caboolture I believe. By luck we found a little bakery-cafe with good food in one of those big complexes with furniture stores like where Spotlight is in Moorabbin. We got some petrol then Tom directed us back to the motorway. Yes, I haven’t mentioned our navigator up until now but he is fantastic! His real name is Tom Tom One Regional but I just call him Tom. We rely on him for not only directions but travel distance and times as he is by far the most accurate measure we have. If you are going to do a bit of travelling we would strongly recommend you invest in a navigator such as this. You won’t be sorry. Occasionally he doesn’t know where we are because there are new roads and sometimes we show up as travelling off the road then appear back on it which may be some programming or mapping problem but it doesn’t get us lost or cause any problems. I think some of the remote areas are less well mapped and so you can’t put in a Point of Interest (POI) because it just isn’t in there but you can get around that by going to the road or street instead. Apparently there will be new maps released in September to download and update it.
So, we got to Hervey Bay by about 5.15pm and it was still light. The temperature outside for much of our drive was between 18 and 19 degrees and it was up to 20 when we got here which is a great improvement on our 5 degrees at about the same time in Lithgow! We got our gear into the holiday unit then went for a walk to the Esplanade where we were told the restaurants are. We found a pub on one corner which was open on the street side and had patio heater and lots of tables etc and decided it looked OK. We made a good choice again. I had a very filling chicken, sundried tomato & spinach risotto and Fin had chicken breast with asparagus & brie encased in it. We both enjoyed our meals then went for walk along the esplanade. (Without jackets!) We were looking for the mariner because we have to be there at 8am to go on our whale watching tour. We didn’t find it but got a map at the office where we are staying and found we will need to drive there from here.