Two Days in 1770

Seventeen Seventy, Australia
24.1614°S, 151.8852°E   

It’s about a 14 hour drive from Airlie Beach to Brisbane Airport. Sarah and I needed to be in Brisbane to catch our flight to Sydney, before flying to Bali the following day.

We had three days to make the trip, and so we mapped out a plan to drive for a few hours the first day, stay the night in a small town called Sarina and then drive for eight hours the next day to the town of Seventeen Seventy (aka 1770).

We had heard good things about 1770 and its neighboring town Agnes Water, so decided we would spend two nights in that area before heading to Brisbane.

The towns of Seventeen Seventy and Agnes Water are located on a small peninsula that juts out into the Coral Sea and Bustard Bay. Once you get off the main highway, you drive along a long, flat and flood prone road before arriving in Agnes Water first, then 1770.

The town of 1770 is named after the year that Captain James Cook landed in Queensland, and is evidently the only town in Australia (maybe the world?) named after a year. Cook is credited with mapping the entire coastline of New Zealand before leading his ship and crew westward to become the first Europeans to land on the eastern coast of Australia. Not surprisingly there’s a lot of stuff named after Cook in this area, including a university, a few counties, and an island.

We pulled into 1770 and parked to ask about accommodations. The town is right on the beach and has a beautiful park and boardwalk that leads up to an overlook called – wait for it – Cook’s Landing Place. The “town” is really just a few streets with restaurants, cafes and surfboard rentals, but we both loved its quaintness and impressive views.

I actually think the real reason Sarah liked 1770 so much is that she had her first face-to-face encounter with a kangaroo family. We were driving around looking for a place to stay, and came across this handsome crew….

This wouldn’t be our only Australian wildlife encounter of the week. On our last day in 1770 we woke up at 3:30 a.m. to head to Brisbane, but not because we had an early morning flight. We had to go hug a koala.

The Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary is one of the few in Australia that let you hold these little guys. I had visited Lone Pine in 2012 for my first koala encounter, but insisted that we return this time around to that Sarah would get to hold her own koala.

We left Lone Pine and headed for Brisbane Airport to catch our flight to Sydney. Our flight from Sydney to Bali was early the next morning, so we stayed at a hotel airport and rested up for the next month in Indonesia.

More pictures from our trip down Queensland’s coast….