Aussie road trip

We'll be in Singapore - again - all next week, on a business trip this time though.

Before we go I thought I'd indulge myself by posting some pics of the road trip we did a few weeks back in Oz, from Sydney to Queensland's Sunshine Coast.

It's a total return journey of about 2,500 kilometres. It seems a long way for a few days, but it's not really by Aussie standards. And anyway, except in Dubai, I enjoy driving, I enjoy road trips, I enjoy the countryside.

There's a lot of this through the windscreen..



You also go through a banana growing area, then through sugar cane plantations...



There's a lot of rolling countryside too, cattle farming areas...



But always you get back to eucalyptus trees...



In the Sydney basin a lot of sandstone...

Each type of countryside lasts for a hundred or more kilometres, which can get a little boring, but there are typically Aussie country roadside shops every so often to break the monotony...

And the unique signs you see nowhere else in the world...

With those you can only be in Australia, but there are other sights you probably wouldn't expect to see there...

There's a lot of country driving, long, long spells without hitting any built up areas. The country towns are very pleasant to drive into though...

We took the Pacific Highway, as I usually do, which is the north-south coast road, most of it just a few kilometres inland. Most of Australia's population lives around the coast and there are pleasant little towns along the route.

This is Noosaville, which is up on the north of Queensland's Sunshine Coast, as far as we went...

And just under halfway between Sydney and Brisbane is one of my favourite country towns, Port Macquarie...

And of course, just about all the way there are the beaches for which Oz is famous. This is part of Coolangatta on Queensland's Gold Coast just across the state border from New South Wales...

It was a great break, not only the road trip and visiting some favourite places but catching up with friends and family.

The bushfires in NSW were under control by the time we arrived, in fact from the mid-north coast onwards there were floods.

We were visiting friends in a little town called Bellingen . Two days before we started the journey the town was cut in two and the only road in was impassable because of floodwaters. Fortunately by the time we reached there it had subsided enough for the roads to be open so we managed to visit them in their new house.

In fact apart from the first two days in Sydney when it was grey and damp the weather was fantastic. All-day sunshine, mid to high twenties celcius, clear blue sky, fresh air...