Didn’t hang around much on our last day. Lots of caravans on the road through the hilly section.
Morning tea in Katherine. When I first came through in 1967 I would have laughed if you’d told me there would be a Coffee Club shop in town one day, but there is.
Home at lunchtime. The house and everything inside it was all safe and sound, which was lovely.…
After dragging Mandy away from taking pictures of the spectacular sunrise, we surfed along the highway north just ahead of the swarm of caravans trailing us.
Morning tea in Elliott, which has cleaned up amazingly in the last little while, and no longer holds the reputation for the grotiest town in Australia.
Reached the hot springs at Mataranka for lunch. Beautiful weather, a lovery warm breeze and not over hot. Walked a bit to Stevie’s Waterhole seeing it was so gorgeous, then Mandy took a dip later in the afternoon. …
Well, we did our calculations. There were 50 caravans in our park, 50 in the other one, over 100 at the Billabong camping for free, and about 50 trucks from the Mt Isa show in the servo carpark. All of them were going our way. So we decided to be up and off at the crack of dawn, and lucky we did so. A little way down the road we were also joined by about 50 army trucks in several convoys. Luckily they were going the opposite way, but it would have made overtaking pretty tricky.
Had morning tea amongst the chaos of Barkly Homestead where every car, caravan, truck and Army vehicle was also trying to find a spot to park.…
After being up early for a lovely sunrise, we headed off to Mt Isa for church and lunch, then mooched on to Camooweal for the evening.
Just our luck. The only pub in town where we were staying couldn’t find a cook that day – why else did we stay there! They pointed us down the road to the Puma servo. Great. However, when we go there we found that every food and entertainment truck that had been at the Mt Isa show the night before had pulled in next to the servo, the Pizza truck was open for business, and weren’t they doing a brisk business.…
Wrapped our caravan in its own special blanket, and put it to bed in Longreach for the season.
Headed north to Cloncurry on the way (eventually) back to Darwin for Term 3.
The Discovery caravan park in Cloncurry is a caravan park on an industrial scale. As well as 26 caravan sites, an unpowered area, pool, bbq and 24 cabins for tourists, there is also a separate ‘workforce’ entrance which has 200 workers cabins, a cafeteria, and gym. There are 5 laundries – all free. Flouro vests everywhere. It’s tradie heaven for the women.…
After lunch we bade farewell to Jacob and his family, hitched up the caravan, and hit the road bound for a paddock in Longreach.…
A birthday celebration for Inga, the youngest of the three, who turned two.…
While Mandy works in the classroom, Zoe (the mother) is taking the opportunity to help with the construction of the new manager’s residence on the property, which will become their new home when finished.…
Travelled south from Jerich across dirt roads on our way to St George to catch up with old friends.
Stopped for the night at Tambo, a small, remote town.
It has what all old towns tend to have – an old pub or two, an old post office, some old houses and a Mr Whippy van.…
