Day 7

We left Tannum Sands bright and early and  headed 403 km up the highway to break the long journey at a much loved spot at Cape Palmerston. The road from Rockhampton to Mackay is long, and always brings back memories of our non-event honeymoon up there. We had booked a beachside bure at Eimeo Beach (which coincidentally features in my November release, Osprey Reef, in the 1930s)

Two months before our wedding, there was a particularly nasty double murder on that lonely stretch of road.

 Due to the high frequency of crime, the highway also earned the nickname "The Badlands". The highway between Marlborough and Sarina was realigned in 1982, and the sealed road which had served as the Bruce Highway at the time of the Weckert murders is now known as Marlborough-Sarina Road.

A couple of hundred kilometres south of that stretch of road, we witnessed a man carry from the bush what looked like a body in a sack. We, in our 1970 HT stationwagon, and several other cars, turned around and went back to Howard Police Station to report what we had seen.

Needless to say, we did not make our bure at Eimeo Beach! We spent our honeymoon at Hervey Bay, the Gold Coast and Nambucca Heads, where we moved to fifteen years later.

Back to Cape Palmerston. A very quiet and peaceful night ... the photos tell it all! The two things to mention about Cape Palmerston are the fresh prawns from their prawn farm and the Taj Mahal of amenities blocks!

We departed bright and early for our next stop ... two weeks at our favourite Airlie Beach.