The alarm sounded at 6:30 this morning and while there was
still enthusiasm in the boys demeanour it was not quite as apparent as
yesterday! We scoffed our brekkie and headed to the yards where the truck was
just pulling alongside the loading ramp, it was a pretty awesome sight in the
gentle light of dawn!
About an hour later we had 234 (I think that was the count)
head on board and the boys had really enjoyed the experience. In the 234 were a
number of older cattle that were destined for the meatworks so the stakes were
a lot higher when moving these stubborn and sometimes very cranky buggers! The
last two, of course, decided to play up, one an old bull with a set of massive
twisted horns, the other a mickey bull that was trying to assert his authority
on the matter. Eventually with an extraordinary amount of whooping they were
both on board and we headed back to camp. It had been a great morning!
We rolled out and headed for Lawn Hill National Park. There
are three way to get there with the ‘short cut’ through Bowthorn Station being
the shortest, however we are still yet to determine if it was the quickest. It
was 152kms to Lawn Hill and after about 10kms I was seriously thinking about
turning around...it was that rough. But there was the 30kms into the camp to
add to the 10 we had just done so I decided we will just have to keep pressing
on. The road was the worst we have been on, except maybe the road out of
Stockyard Gully in WA, with massive sandy patches, corrugations you could lose
a dog in and bull dust that was so thick you couldn’t see the back of the truck
in the side mirror, let alone the caravan! We trudged on and reached the
homestead after 20kms and from then on the road got better...it was far from
perfect but relativity is a wonderful thing!
 |
| A dingo we saw on the way. Whilst it isn't an awe inspiring pic they are really hard to capture as they are soooo elusive. |
All of the sites at the national park were full so we stayed
just outside the park at Adels Grove a private park with an interesting
history. A somewhat eccentric bloke had moved here (the middle of nowhere...a
few hundred kilometres north of Cloncurry) in the late 1800s and planted a
massive grove of trees from all around the world. He cultivated the plants and
sold the seeds internationally with 235 odd plants in the Brisbane Botanic
gardens, that are still alive, being planted from seeds this bloke harvested!
We set up and went for a swim in the river which was pretty
bloody cold! The boys and I had fun jumping from an overhanging branch but it
was just too cold to stay in.....I think we may be going to have trouble when
we head south!!!
The boys had a quick catch up with Deb and Andrew’s as well
as Jo and Stuart’s kids riding their bikes like madman through the ‘grove’. We
had managed to find some cracking bits of dried redwood for the fire and we got
it going nice and early so we had red hot coals to cook on. Unfortunately we
had forgotten that we were no longer in the official ‘tropics’ where you can
take meat out of the freezer and it is defrosted an hour later so I found
myself soaking the mince in warm water scapping the semi defrosted bits off
with my now frozen fingers in order to make meatballs. Apparently half frozen
mince doesn’t bind very well as most of the meat balls in my cassoulet were no
longer balls! Oh well! It had been
another biiig day and it wasn’t long before I collapsed into bed.
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