Today we headed for Springbrook National Park. In the planning stages of this trip we made a decision to avoid large cities, one for the difficulties in finding campsites and two because we wanted to see as much of the country and bush camp as often as possible. Springbrook is in the mountains inland from the Gold Coast, to get there we had to drive through Brisbane and because the main motorway has e-tag tolls we took the highway with all the traffic lights right through the middle of Brisbane. Once clear of the city it was smooth driving to Nerang where we turned off to headed back into the mountains. We were about two thirds of the way up and the left and right lanes split into two separate cuttings in the rock and where they met again there was a quaint old cottage / tea rooms that had been built in the 1920s and it was lunch time. It turned out that they had just employed a new Italian chef and the menu had had to be rewritten but he was able to do a Chicken & Mushroom fettuccini that was delicious.

After lunch we finished the climb and arrived at the Settlement campground in Springbrook National Park. The campground was quite new and the sites a little tight but each site was fairly secluded and there were only a couple of camper vans there.