October 17, 18: We arrived in Mermaid Waters, on the Gold Coast.

We passed the Byron Bay fire, marked by huge plumes of smoke, that also reached the Gold Coast.

When we crossed the border, our phones eventually adjusted to the Queensland time zone (no daylight saving). But the Tesla, for some reason, didn’t update, even after a couple of days. After a brief googling, we tried pressing the time on the screen for five seconds and voila! It updated. Since the car has its own GPS and Internet connection, it keeps the time updated without any manual settings.

The highway into the Gold Coast is chaos. I feel like this road work has been going on for years. The road work has necessitated lots of diversions in adjacent suburbs, which then force more traffic into the highway just to get around. It took us half an hour to get a few blocks, plus diversions, to West Burleigh post office where we had packages delivered, when predicting where we would be on a particular date. Nomadic life!

We’re staying at Mermaid Waters Hotel until Saturday morning. It includes buffet breakfast each morning, so we’re very happy. Just watching the little pikelets being made is almost as nice as eating them.

Charging:

We charged up for free at The NRMA charger in Casino while we had lunch. We arrived on the Gold Coast with about 60%. The hotel doesn’t have any accessible power points or chargers, but there are heaps of public chargers around town. Well just use one when we park somewhere this week.