Big things road trip day eight - Townsville to Charters Towers

Jan 2, 20212 min read

Today was the day that we were turning away from the coast and heading inland for the second part of our trip. Charters Towers is only a 90-minute drive from Townsville, so there wasn't too much driving to do today.

We initially planned to head to Paluma and Crystal Creek National Park / Rainforest to check out the rock pools before driving to Charters Towers, but because of how dry it had been we gave this a miss. If you are visiting at a wetter time of year it would definitely be worth checking these out.

We enjoyed a leisurely brunch at the Fish Inn Rockpool cafe before waving goodbye to the ocean. As we didn't have too much driving to do, we decided to head up to the Mount Stuart lookout on the way. There is a really great view from the top and a circuit walk around the top of the mountain you can do. There are no safety rails and some parts are quite steep, so don't bring little kids on it. We weren't quite prepared for this and tackled it in our thongs, but we survived.

On the way down there are some world war 2 bunkers you can check out, just be careful and don't go beyond the fence lines as there are unexploded bombs there that might blow your face off.

We pulled into Charters Towers about lunchtime and headed to the grocery store to pick up some lunch and dinner supplies for the next couple of days. Once we had our stash we headed up to Towers Hill lookout and enjoyed lunch up at the lookout.

We then got a message from the place we were staying tonight that our room was ready, so we headed off. On the drive through town we even managed to spot a big chainsaw of the roof of the Stihl shop in the main street.

I really wanted to go to the Texas Longhorn farm and do a tour. However, these only run from May-October and we were a few weeks too late. If you are visiting in these months definitely check them out - it looks awesome! I settled for patting some friendly cows that lived near the place we were staying.

We spent the night a Kernow Charters Towers, which used to be the local mental asylum but is in the process of being done up into some very swanky accomodation and made very good use of the washing machine in our room!