The blog may have been quiet but we've been busy!

This is what my shirt looks like after a typical day of renovations (the brown on my arms is mostly dirt, not a tan)...

 

And we've been busy spending lots of money too, on things like landscaping ($1000), a new point of sale system ($2500), concreting around the laundry and shed ($5000), 160 solar panels generating 30+ kilowatts of electricity ($lots)... The list goes on and the invoices stack up. But we're super busy and the books make happy reading :) That and all the positive reviews on Trip Advisor help us sleep at night (from 4 to 20 since we arrived).

 

If you haven't checked out the website blog then you won't realise we've been busy blogging on there: http://www.dunkislandviewcaravanpark.com/blog.html But what we haven't mentioned on there (because it's probably a bit dull to our current campers and caravanners) is that we saw our first wild cassowary the other day. In actual fact we saw two - a daddy cassowary with a young chick. Apparently the male looks after the young while the mother goes off and does something else (shopping maybe, or ordering more barramundi and rice bran oil for the fish & chip café we've just opened... As you do).

 

 

Baby on board

We were in Cairns at the weekend for the 20 week scan and the little one seems happy and healthy. Plus we found out it's a boy.

Dunk Island View Cafe...

Megan is bored of caravans and is about to open up her first ever chippy. Apparently this little venture will make us buckets of money because people love chips. Simple right? We're fast learning that the hospitality industry isn't rocket science, but it does equal sore feet a lot of the time!

Playing with ourselves

We took a day off last weekend but we just ended up doing a reccy on our competitors, bakeries, and Murdering Point Winery (more on that later). In between all that we did get a chance to remind ourselves that we can do fun stuff without the business falling apart. Here are a few snaps from Etty Bay and Innisfail, where we had the best fish and chips ever (outside Scotland) down by the river.

Caravan ON!

When we got up this morning it was 15 degrees centigrade, which compared to yesterday felt like the freezing point for nitrogen. Back home people would've said how warm it was, and Geordies and Glaswegians would've started running around with no tops on.

Then the sun came out and people started arriving from all over the place. Grey nomads from Sydney, an Irish couple cruising around in their daughter's campervan hoping one of the local skydivers would plummet spectacularly to their death, a dozen British twenty somethings who had a little trouble paying, a girl from London who works for Rough Guides, an English couple who were completely lost trying to find their hotel and decided to stay with us instead...

This last couple decided to do some laundry, which included a pair of black bikini bottoms with cute metal tassels on the side. Anyway, I had to take them out of the dryer because they were making a lot of noise and upsetting some grey nomads. She will be thrilled when she finds out I had to sift through her underwear collection.

Here is a photo of the park starting to look a bit fuller.

Parallel blogging

When we set up the caravan park website we created another blog on there to keep campers abreast of all the exciting things happening in the Mission Beach area. You can check it out by clicking here.

Still no tan

After almost three weeks in the tropics neither of us has a tan yet. Probably because we're so busy in the office at the moment learning how to run everything before the snow birds arrive. This photo of me taken at the Tully Golden Gumboot Festival (a festival to celebrate the monumental amounts of rainfall the town of Tully receives each year*) shows how white I still am. To achieve Megan's skin colour increase the brightness of your monitor by around 50%.

* Tully receives over five metres of rainfall each year which is about the same as the wettest part of Scotland. One year they recorded 7.9m so they built a huge golden gumboot (welly boot) of that height in the road leading into town to show off to all their rival towns how awesomely wet their town is.