Highways and Barbys ...

Two additional notes to my post from yesterday. My destination today is not Hervey Beach, but Hervey Bay ... And thanks to a loyal follower for recommending the app 'PlantSnap' ... With this app, I now know what strange plant I photographed yesterday. It is a Pandanus palm or screw tree. According to Wikipedia, it is a completely unspectacular plant ... But the app is good ...

I have used the car rides in the last few days effectively and I am now up to date with all the podcasts I listen to ...

Since there wasn't much going on today, I can write about a few things that I noticed during the trip.

Let's start with the negative. So far, I have seen more dead kangaroos than alive ones. It is unbelievable how many animals are lying by the roadside, run over. Big, small, intact, half, quartered, everything included. The animals seem to like to spend the evenings and nights on the heated asphalt, and the underfloor heating seems to be often fatal for them. Of course, I didn't take any photos of that.

Then I have been driving on Highway 1 towards the south for days. When you hear 'highway', you imagine at least a 4-lane highway. In Germany, you would call this highway a well-developed federal road ...

But there are passing lanes every 5 - 10 kilometers, so nobody has to get nervous and annoyed and make risky overtaking maneuvers.

There is a lot of construction work going on on the highway, and construction site traffic lights are often used. I wondered why there is also a worker at every traffic light. Is it a job creation measure ...? But if you observe it for a longer time, you see that the workers control the traffic lights manually and via walkie-talkie. Red on both sides when construction vehicles cross the construction site and, depending on the traffic situation, controlling the flow of traffic. Because of this, I have never had to wait at traffic lights for a long time. So actually a good thing ...

And what I really like and what I have seen everywhere from Sydney through the Outback and along the east coast are the publicly usable gas grills, the so-called 'barbys', derived from BBQ ... City administrations and national parks set them up for free and anyone can use them. I have passed by such grills where children's birthdays were being celebrated, families were simply grilling there, and it looked like friends were also meeting there to barbecue. And most of the time they are also close to the water or in other beautiful surroundings. Here are a few examples.

And also one in use, of course, I didn't want to disturb anyone by taking photos.

Tomorrow I will be picked up at 7:25 a.m. in front of the hotel and brought back again the day after tomorrow at around 5:00 p.m. In between, there are two days on Fraser Island. This time, instead of a three square meter cabin, I will have a four-bed room. I am excited about all the new impressions and will report back from my tour.