moneypenny20

It would appear that people who don't live in the state have greater experience of the place. Weird that their experience bears no resemblance to the place I live in but as I said previously, everyone has a different perspective on heat and humidity. Hope you find somewhere to park the van Louie.

Beoz

Its OK. If you live there the justification for being proud is understandable. From a tourist perspective it ain't much chop. Just balancing out the Queensland tourism marketing machine with reality.

moneypenny20

Proud? What am I proud about? I live where I live because I want to, it's just a place I like. You don't but presumably you like where you live. Are you proud of your area? If so, why? . Obviously not a tourist but if it ain't much chop there's one hell of a lot of tourists in the State week in week out (not at the moment obviously).

paulry

Same here. I've been to Queensland as a visitor several times. For business as well as on holiday and those were my observations and experience. But I can understand why MP might be a bit prickly about it.

Beoz

"Most" people are generally proud of where they live, otherwise "most" would move on, however some may be stuck for whatever reason. However the thread is about touring and climate rather than living

Yep, as I mentioned the Queensland marketing machine is one hell of a machine. Lots of tourists, thats for sure. I just don't see what is promoted actually existing for the most part. What's the slogan "Beautiful one day, perfect the next" - well that's drawing a long bow. The Gold Coast has about 1500mm of rainfall annually whereas Melbourne gets about 500mm.

I got dragged to Far North Queensland last year in winter thinking this would be an ideal time. Dry season, little humidity, what could go wrong. The bloody water temperature at the reef and in the hotel pools (sorry no swimmable beaches in FNQ) - thats what went wrong. It was bloody freezing. I thought going right to the outer reef where the continental shelf ends would lend itself to a better looking, more vibrant reef. Nup ..... its bleached and dull out there too.

Every time I do Queensland, aside from Noosa, it just leaves me disappointed.

paulry

A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I traveled as far north as we could at the time - going as far as Tweed Heads. Funny going as far as the roundabout in the middle of tweed heads with the "Welcome to Queensland sign and next thing you know your return the way you came (because all the turn offs were blocked) back to the "Welcome to New South Wales" sign! We stayed most of the time at a nice AirBNB in New Brighton - at beautiful place there - loved it. We stayed also at Nambucca Heads, and visited several of the great seaside towns along the way. A walk around the lighthouse at Byron Bay was excellent, great views and some gorgeous beaches about. Found a few really good pieces of paradise to chill out all to ourselves. On the way back we took an inland route mostly because my wife likes to see all the quaint country towns. Stopped off at Tamworth for a night and had a good look around Newcastle - what an amazing place. Love all the colonial architecture. Then we sat by the heads and watched an oil tanker being shepherded in by a posse of tugs. I loved that especially, because my grandfather worked on the Cardiff and Barry tugs years ago. He would have loved that awesome spectacle. A nice trip.

moneypenny20

I'm proud of good things I've done, of what my kids and friends have done. I like living where I do, if I didn't, I'd move. Your understanding of 'proud' differs from mine. Yours makes no sense to me.

Beoz

Sounds like a great drive. Great time to not be distracted by far and away places and explore local. There's some great untapped spots.

paulry

Another highlight was stopping off at a small village in the middle of no-where along the way for a toilet break where we encountered a general store selling freshly picked blueberries @ $9 a kilo. A real bargain and they were delicious!

abner

The average humidity around Christmas-time in QLD does drop off somewhat from North to South, along the coast. On average, the differences between, say Cairns, and Mackay, and Gladstone, and the Gold Coast (roughly 500km jumps in each case), are noticeable if you're really looking for them, but not dramatic overall. Moving south gives you a different, slightly more comfortable point on a spectrum for humidity, rather than a step-change.

The wild-card is greater Brisbane (incl. roughly 50 km in any direction from the CBD), where the 6 - 8 weeks from late November to early January is just a crapshoot, year to year, and even week to week within any given year. Around Christmas, in some years, Brisbane sometimes attracts the most intense electrical storms I've seen anywhere on the planet, or hailstorms, or brief localised bursts of intense rain and wind comparable to a cyclone. Or, in other years, it's typically "29 and fine", and can stay that way pretty much throughout the Christmas period. (Personally, I enjoyed the intense weather episodes as much as the "29 and fine" ones, when I lived there.)

From a pure climate perspective, it sounds like your best bets are in the Gold Coast / Sunshine Coast, or their hinterlands. But you've commented that those are all booked up, from a caravan perspective (which I know nothing about). Perhaps look around someplace like Beaudesert, which has passable local services without being too touristy, and is 1 - 2 hours from most South East Queensland attractions, including Brisbane. Or, if northern NSW is left to next year, in your master plan, and SEQ is all booked up, then the area from Gympie north to Rockhampton is your next best hunting ground.

abner

And yet, Toowoomba is by no means as hot as Longreach (which the OP seemed to find preferable to a high-humidity locale), is a quite pleasant small city in its own right (e.g. has the sorts of shops, restaurants, services, etc., that one would expect for a ~100K-ish population regional city), and is roughly 2 hours by road from the coast.

If the OP can find caravan space there, and can't anywhere else in SEQ, it should be a reasonable if slightly more distant alternative to other areas he was looking at.

paulry

Except for the wind that sounds a lot like Johannesburg in summertime.

abner

From pure curiousity, I googled around for stats on the topic, but it was difficult to find fully comparable ones. However, in aggregrate terms (lightning strikes per km2 per year), neither Brisbane nor Johannesburg really ranks highly at all on a global scale; apparently, there are areas in Venezuela, Congo, and Pakistan with dramatically higher annual figures.

But in those areas, lightning activity is described as intense but relative steady for long seasonal stretches. My experience of Brisbane's lightning is that Energex would often report 10s of 1000s of strikes per storm (including 60,000 to 80,000 per storm in one particularly spectacular fortnight in late 2008) during the six week season, then we'd experience next to nothing for the rest of the year. (Not sure how this compares to Johannesburg; I've never been there.)

paulry

In Johannesburg, the typical mid summertime cycle would be a day of hot but not humid heat until mid afternoon when the clouds would begin to coalesce, culminating in a cracker of an electric storm between 4 and 5pm, dropping enormous quantities of rain and would last for 20 mins or so before disappearing as suddenly as it arrived. Then the roads and everything would turn all steamy and half an hour later you would be hard pressed to see that the storm actually happened at all. Occasionally there would be heavy storms at night too which was when we best able to see the most awesome lightning shows. Used to love driving to Johannesburg from Pretoria late afternoon and about 40kms away from the city I could see the sweeping plain in front of me with the most amazing vista. And within that view I'd could see maybe 10 to 15 different storms ahead - each with the thick rain beneath them and their own collection of lightning bolts. It's an absolutely awesome sight to see. Storm season is in the summer. Wintertime is completely different, when pretty much every day is clear blue skies, not a drop of rain in sight ...and bloody cold!

Check out some of the images that came up doing a google search. Some of them are insane - but just as I remember them!

https://www.google.com/search?q=joha...w=1920&bih=937

I searched for photos of the multiple storms across the plain view but unfortunately I couldn't find any. This link of three pages is pretty good for photos in that region where you can get an appreciation of the wide and often rugged landscapes. Some stormy photos there too:

https://www.gettyimages.com.au/photo...rt=mostpopular

...Thinking about all of that has made me wish if I could go back there for another trip.

the troubadour

Sounds to me you are confusing pride with achievement and not location as I believe what was being referred to.