Distance travelled – 58.5 km
Avg speed – 16.9 kph
Max speed – 47.6 kph

Gympie, Tin Can Bay

It’s raining heavily AGAIN this morning.

As we checked in yesterday the manager seemed very taken by our trip. It turned out he and his wife used to own the lease to the motel and they had come back to do some relief work.  Overnight he had obviously been thinking more about our trip asking us about tyres and saddles indicating that he was keen to ride from South Australia to the gulf or Cape York. It seems we have inspired someone to think more about following through on one of their dreams. However, we suspect his wife will be piloting the car and caravan.

Before leaving Gympie we took time to ride into Mary Street and have a look around.  Mary Street is the ‘main’ street with many old buildings to look at. A couple of blocks of the street are a single lane ‘mall’ with a mix of cars and pedestrians. It was interesting to see the long queue of traffic through this section. I would have thought the locals would have avoided this part of town but they seem to patiently drive slowly through. We would have taken one of the adjacent streets that were clear of traffic so we are not sure why this is a preferred route.

As we explored the mosaics in Memorial Lane (photo above) I got talking to one of the locals and mentioned how hilly we found the town. He mentioned that as a young lad he had made a crude trailer for his bicycle so that he could tow his lawn mower around town to earn some pocket money cutting lawns. He said he very quickly learnt which streets to ride down and which ones to ride up and to this day still uses these routes in his car.

We left Gympie as it began to rain again. Our destination was Tin Can Bay.  Thankfully our route through Gympie was not as hilly as we had first feared. Between Gympie and Ross Creek there is a lot of up and down and we found this section of road rather tiring. We were to discover later that when Tin Can Bay was first established supplies were brought in from Maryborough, as the hills between Tin Can Bay and Gympie were considered impassable.

From Ross Creek the road levels out and passes through a lot of pine forest before descending into Tin Can Bay. We noted there is at least an 11km of climbing to do on our way back out on our way to Maryborough.

Our plan was to stay two nights so we could go and see the dolphin feeding at Norman Point in the morning. We discovered the Dolphin Waters Holiday Apartments 15 minutes walk away and were able to get two nights at what we felt was a reasonable rate.

We walked back into town to buy supplies for dinner. There was not much choice of meat in the supermarket fridge so rather than buy a packet of “Budget Rump Steak” I persuaded Denise to buy sausages as I could just imagine “Budget” being a marketing term for “tough”.

We both commented how hard we found today. As we left Gympie we were not worried by the distance so we both suspect it was all the climbing and the small headwind we had most of the way. Anyhow we are glad for the rest tomorrow.

Rhys and Karyn’s massage oil will definitely get a work out this evening.

Zoom into the map and use the 'Satellite' layer to see our new location.

Mary Street, Gympie.

Another coffee shop picture. We just happened to stop here and only noticed the window after we had come back to our bikes.

Rest stop on the road to Tin Can Bay.

An interesting combination of warning signs.

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