Apple Tree Creek - Free Camping

20/10/2014

We left Elliot Heads Caravan Park after a nice few windy days but all the same nice. Like a lot of places around the Queensland Coast you need the Bushman's spray to protect from the sandflies. We met a lovely couple who parked next to us Mel and Jenifer, we had a great chat before we both moved on.

(Set up at Apple Tree Creek Community Park)

We headed out and thought we would drive the short distance of 67kms to Apple Tree Creek community reserve arriving reasonably early we had the choice of many places to park for the day and night after doing this and setting up we went for a walk and a look around the place. It is a free camp area it has clean toilets, free electric BBQ's to use and good size playgrounds for the kids.

In addition to this is has a pie van that sells pies, fish and chips, burgers and many other choices, it operates from 0700 hours to 1400 hours other tan early October and February she has holidays, prices are good and the food quality is good. There was also a veg and fruit man there selling his wares.

You are allowed to stay here for 20 hours only and it is interesting watching as the afternoon progresses the amount of people arriving to set up camp, there are large caravans, small campervans, people in tents, motorhomes like us and truckies. Just on dark we had a semi-trailer pull up alongside us, the truckie asked if we are leaving before 0630 hours and we said no, so he shut the engine down and said he was off to the pub for a feed. One thing that I have to chuckle about is some of the caravans that pull up, their first priority is setting up the satellite dish for the TV. I heard this hammering and wondered what it was, it was a bloke setting up the dish and hammering pegs in the ground to hold it in place.

(Kids playgrounds)

(Pie Van)

(Fruit stall)

(1st World War memorial, on the front it has the honours list of those that lost their lives and on the other three sides it has a list of all service men that went to war from Apple Tree Creek)

(Mid afternoon vehicles start arriving it was full by dark.)

(Sports area)

(The Story)

 (The Apple Tree Hotel)

Like most free camps there is road noise but in our unit with double glazing it is not annoying and one gets used to noise when you know what it is. I think that the good thing about the truckie parking next to us gave us a barrier between us and the road. We had a pretty good sleep anyway.

Tomorrow we are off to Tinnanbar which is right on the Great Sandy Straits so we will be dealing with more sandflies.

Cheers