Laura to Coen

I've had trouble with both internet signal and uploading photos, so have written the blog each day, but uploading is not a simple process - and including photos even less simple!  So I'm going to upload pages about each stretch of the trip as and when I can, and will most likely upload photos when I get home and have wifi again.

This section relates to Saturday 9 August:

The road to Coen was mostly uneventful, if you discount the half million corrugations along the way!  Some sections of the road were pretty bad, but thankfully we didn’t have to do any repairs when we arrived at Coen.

It was pretty slow going, and took us 4 hours to do 260ks!  When we finally reached Coen around 1pm, all any of us wanted was a cold beer, so we stopped at the pub for a beer, as you do, and decided to have lunch there before heading to the Coen river, where there was, according to the Cape York Destination Guide (one of our bibles) a gorgeous free camping spot alongside the river, with a toilet block.  Well we found the Coen River and a couple of camping spots of dubious quality, with no real spot to put the campers, and, more importantly, no toilet block!

So we went back into Coen and asked at the pub where the campground in town was – according to the Destination Guide, the camping ground was behind the Homestead Guest House, which we couldn’t find!  But fortunately, the pub had a lovely campground behind it and cheap as chips - $5 per head plus $5 for power!   And there were fireplaces so we could have a campfire and I cooked my second ever meal in a camp oven. 

The pub also had a couple of “pub dogs” which were very territorial and didn’t like any other dogs in the campground, but one of them, a lovely kelpie, adopted us for the night - he even growled at the other “pub dog” when he tried to visit - and slept just outside the camper all night!  He stayed and watched us as we packed up in the morning, but, as soon as John unplugged the power and started rolling up the lead, he got up and trotted off, and we didn’t see him again!