Journey to Mon Repos

Mon Repos is the home for a newly refurbished turtle sanctuary and education centre - they educate the public, not the turtles. It’s currently breeding and nesting season so turtles are coming up to the beach to lay eggs. We thought we’d go there to watch this.

The journey was 641km, not far shy of 400 miles. Bertha is a 1995 truck with a Winnebago accommodation unit on her back. She runs really well and is delightful to drive in a rather old fashioned way, akin to driving my old 1965 Hillman Minx. Manual gears, gear changes to go up hill, no cruise control, a/c that cools rather than chills the air; coupled with the fact that she is not aerodynamic, she is subject to crosswinds and the funny areas of turbulence that spring from nowhere, driving her requires a lot of concentration. We started at 9:00 and arrived at 6:35 having stopped twice for fuel and a very brief shop to get some dinner. By the time we arrived at Mon Repos, we knew we’d been driving all day.

The creeks we had driven over two days before, now had water in them. We also had to go across a shallow river ford. We passed a memorial to the crew and passengers of a plane that crashed in the war.Read more