ALSTONVILLE

Leaving our road-stop around 9 this morning, we traveled via Grafton where we refueled (diesel $1.487) and just north of there we started seeing for the first time crops of sugar cane in the fields. Detouring slightly off the Pacific Highway, which is bedlam, we passed through a nice country town with Scottish heritage called Maclean, then across the Clarence River and onto another little town called Woodburn. Just before reaching Ballina we turned inland for 7kms to Alstonville where we booked into the local showgrounds (photo) for 3 days at $15.00 night for power and water, but looks they don't have any showers so we will just use our own in "Lucky Pigs". We plan to do some washing here and use it as a base to venture down to the Ballina and Byron Bay coastal areas in the Suzuki in the next few days, so we may even extend our stay here if we need to as it is a nice quiet spot. Digital TV, Mobile Phone & Internet is very good here. They apparently had a lot of rain here yesterday, so looks like our luck is changing as we missed it!