Day 201 – 25/6/14 - Nelia (Julia Creek) – Richmond QLD

At some point between 3 and 4am I was woken by a rooster in full flight, and I realised I was in a half frozen state. After some consideration, about ½ a millisecond, I rustled around in the drawer pulling out the remote control and setting it to 27 degrees. The unit has a temperature gauge which read 8 oC which to those in the southern states doesn’t sound too cold but when you are used to minimum overnight temperatures plummeting to the mid to high teens you will understand that 8 is bloooody cold for us. It took about 15 minutes to permate the van and under the doona at which stage I fell back into a deep sleep.

At 8 something  o’clock De and I pried our eyes open and were happy that the boys had had such a massive sleep in. Err the only problem was that they weren’t in bed. They had been up since 6:30 ish, we never managed to get the real time, playing and feeding the animals as well as getting the fire going. We dragged them back in for breakfast on the condition that they could cook some toast over the fire, which is all they wanted to have!

We did a bit of school work, desperate to get it all finished before the last week of the trip and then, after saying goodbye to our wonderful, and somewhat unique, hosts we rolled out...only slowed by the fact that the battery on Izzy was flat due to the ACC having been left on all night so the boys could use the UHF.

We rolled across parched plains  where even the trees were dying through to Richmond. As we pulled into town the Rentco V8 Ute truck had set its self up so we pulled over for a look. Sharon who was looking after the truck was wonderful and looked after the boys as if they were her own, even giving them each fancy caps. She also managed to track us down to let us know that Jack had left his jumper there when we had left!

We knew Richmond is famous for its dinosaurs but this is ridiculous!

It’s De’s birthday tomorrow so I had to make sure there was a bakery in town, so I could get essential supplies for tomorrow’s lunch, before confirming we could set up. I was in luck and Deb at the bakery went one step further but the details will have to wait until tomorrow!

We set up at the local van park, which was only $33/night, and after lunch had a bit of a nana nap before walking down town to check out the  big attraction in town Kronosaurus Corner. We bought our Dinosaur Trail ticket, $130 worth, that gets us into the centres in Richmond, Hughenden and Winton and had a look around before stopping in at the butchers and picking up some lamb shanks before heading back. Now a lot of things in this part of the world are more expensive than in the city but the lamb shanks were only $5.99/kg so I got 6!

Beside the park was a big lake so the boys disappeared for the afternoon exploring around it, watching people fish and swim their horses while I baked a cake for tomorrow and De had some quite time. After dinner the boys and I prepared De’s ‘presents’ for the big day tomorrow. One of the big challenges of having birthdays or the like on the road is finding presents in small country  towns, but more about that tomorrow!

Day 200 – 24/6/14 - Rest area East of Cloncurry – Nelia (Julia Creek) QLD

We woke to the van rocking and swaying like a couple of 18 year olds were testing out the suspension, the only problem was it was the wind and not De and I! A few months ago we stowed the table inside the caravan away preferring to eat outside, and it gave us just that little bit more space to move around inside Gator. The chances of us eating outside this morning were Buckley’s and NONE, so the table was reassembled and a warming breakfast of eggy bread (aka French toast) was dished  up to the hungry hoards!

We rolled on to Julia Creek, heading straight for the library to do some school work, rather than sitting in the cooold van! With that out of the way we wondered the streets of ‘The Creek’ poking our nose in some shops, having lunch and checking the information centre. I really wish we had held off spending money in Cloncurry yesterday and used it in Julia Creek instead. The information centre was one of the best we have seen, simple but informative and while we missed Digby the Dunnart ( a Julia Creek Dunnart is a small critter than looks like a cross between a meerkat and a possum and can only be found around Julia Creek) we quite enjoyed our stay!

The boys and Digby

We really enjoyed Julia Creek! 

While there is a free camp just outside of The Creek that is provided by the local council (including free loan bikes so you can ride into town) we headed further east to an old railway town called Nelia where a unique couple, Eric and Georgie, have set up a kind of caravan park in their back yard. Apart from being in their back yard the other big difference was the menagerie of animals that we were sharing the yard with. To name a few there were geese, turkeys, a few breeds of ducks, heaps of chickens, peacocks, guinea fowl, doves, pigeons sheep and a herd of goats that had wondered in a month or so ago and decided to call it home. And the boys were loving it!

They wondered around the yard with turkeys gobbling at them, rounding up ducks and checking the chicken laying boxes that were old mower catchers. At one point Jack saw a cattle truck pulling out of a road so they jumped on their bikes and went to investigate. They rode for 15 minutes down the road and then decided that they couldn’t find it and to come back. The only problem was that the 15 minute ride was with the wind at their back...so half an hour later puffing and panting  and with faces as red as a beetroot they crawled into camp. A trick for young players!

As the sun drew down on another day it was time to feed the animals and they came from everywhere in even bigger numbers! Georgie fetched some old pop corn and gave it to the boys to feed the goats with. The boys were in 7^th heaven and I was starting to look around for an old bloke with a long grey beard building a boat!

As I cooked dinner the boys and Eric got the camp fire going and we sat around it eating our dinner and having a few laughs. The boys also bottle fed ‘Jilly’ an orphaned goat and amazingly enough she and Sebastian a full size goat hung around the fire warming themselves from it. I have never seen an animal do this before it was quite amazing as it warmed its side, then head, then the other side and eventually its head. Once Sebatian was warm enough he wondered of into the darkness to who knows where!

We put the boys to bed and stayed for a drink or two more but even with the fire glowing red coals in front of us it wasn’t enough to keep us warm all over so we retreated to the van and pulled the covers up as high as we could!

Day 199 – 23/6/14 - Bang Bang rest area – Rest area East of Cloncurry QLD

An absolutely amazing thing happened this morning. Something that it has taken us nearly 200 days to accomplish! We left the rest area before 7 other vans! While this I am sure doesn’t excite those who are not of the caravanning  fraternity, and even less so for those in the greying part of said fraternity, but for us Grooters (Grey at the roots) it is a massive achievement!!

Happy with our efforts we rolled south, pulling up to talk with a broken down car by the side of the road 15kms north of the Burke and Wills Road House. The poor bugger chassis had snapped and he had been there since 1pm yesterday waiting for the RACQ from Mt Isa to come and get him. As a note this is the second time we have seen the same thing happen to a Mitsubishi Triton, so anybody considering what 4WD to buy might be well advised to steer clear of these.

At the road house we followed up the RACQ and found that (at around 11) it had just been dispatched, we let a north bound traveller know and asked him to pass the message on, in the hope they could at least ‘relax’ as much as they could.

We rolled into Cloncurry, had a quick lunch and then did a MASSIVE stock up. This was the first Woolworths we have seen for a few weeks so we parted with $400 there, filled the diesel tank, another $100, and a carton of beer had gone from $65 to $50 so I had better have one of them as well as some wine for the little lady and then $60 worth of gas bottles!

Once we had made our donation to the towns economy we visited the original QANTAS hangar that still stands today and then went to see the RFDS meuseum but it was $25, even though it would have been good for the boys to see we had already spent enough today. We moved onto the tourist information centre and were asked for $30 to visit their small museum! I almost felt like taking everything back, instead we leaned over the entry gate to have a brief ‘look’ at Burke’s original water bottle (which is a pretty significant item) and a tree, well part of one, that had been blazed at one of the camps near Cloncurry by Burke and Wills’ party. I think I need to write to the local council and thank them for their hospitality!

Burke's water bottle is the flat black thing lying in the middle

We happily left Cloncurry behind us and drove 40 kms east to a rest area. The country out here could not be in any starker contrast to what we have seen all the way across the top end, where ‘paddocks’ have been filled with waist deep grass so thick you can hardly walk through it. Even two hundred kilometres to the north, while the feed was thinning, there was still a lot around. Now the paddocks surrounding us were virtual wastelands, with hardly a blade of grass to be seen. Initially I thought it might have been poor farming but it continued kilometre, after kilometre. I felt really sorry for the poor graziers who are trying to make a living off this barren land.

At the rest area the boys were stoked to find a few head of cattle in the paddock next to it, so the whip was out and off they went chasing the poor half starving buggers across their paddock that resembled  and Indian cricket pitch rather than a grassy savannah. The remainder of the day and into the night was uneventful except for De’s chair finally giving way to the rigors of the road. The supporting  bolts had long been replaced by bent nails and the sort so I think I will be off to the hardware store in the morning! 

Yet another magnificent sunset!

Day 198 – 22/6/14 – Karumba Point – Bang Bang Rest Area QLD

The boys had been up late the night before, but usually that doen’t adjust their waking time, but today it DID....Hip Hip Hooray! Sam didn’t was until 7:45 and Jacko was still full of zzzs at 8:25...in what must be a world record...for us at least. The only problem was that we had to have breakfast, pack up and be at the Barramundi Discovery centre 15 minutes drive away by 9:30 for the tour....action stations!

Amazingly enough we pulled out at 9:14 getting to the centre with 2 minutes to spare. As a great back up to our fruitless drive to Karumba yesterday, after all our frantic activity we arrived to find out it was $40 for the tour. Kind of laughing at the irony of it all we turned around and drove back to the point to launch the boat!

Karumba is supposed to be a fishermans heaven but by the reports I was getting and the number of boats that i could see on the water I unloaded Rufus with a certain lack of optimism. We were ahead of the pack, as it was still three hours till high tide, so we had the choice of where to go.

We headed out towards the shipping channel hoping to find a hole, only to find the wind blowing straight up the channel was rolling up some pretty nasty little waves that were way too big for us to sit in. We punched our way back to where we had just come from and anchored up off the ‘beach’ in the river where a lot of people fish from.

 Half an hour later Sam had managed to catch a small grunter with Jack and I not able to loose our bait. We headed out a bit further to a second spot where a few boats had gathered and another half an hour later the anchor was being pulled with nothing to show. Again we followed the crowd to a spot on the other side of the river mouth that looked a bit more promising as there at least look to be some structure. 30 minutes later and both Jack and Sam could both chalk up undersized grunters while I still have the same bait! For a bit of fun we wacked some deep diving lures on a trolled the channel and beacons knowing full well that I had as much chance of catching a fish as getting a call from Ewan McKenzie asking me if I’d like to strap on some boots for the next game. Predictably nothing happened!

The good thing about going out with low expectations is when you expectations are met you achieve some kind of weird satisfaction out of it. So we loaded Rufus on board, using the boat loader for the first time in three or four months, had a scrappy lunch made from whatever we could find and hit the road.

For the next two hours we headed south across the gulf’s grassy savannahs. It is an amazing experience to be able to see an uninterrupted horizon 240 degrees around you, no hills, hardly a tree in sight, just grassy plains that fall into the shimmering reflective haze that is the horizon up here.

We passed back through Normanton only pausing long enough to get a picture at the ‘Big Barra’, the closest we have been to catching one of these things in the gulf!

We headed out of town and pulled over to capture our last right hand turn of the trip. The first one had been  on December 27^th last year, south of Geelong as we turned from south to west, then south of Fremantle we tacked northward until we reached Broome where we pointed our rig back eastward. Our last turn took us away from the Savanah Way spinning us back southward for the downhill run back into Brisbane. This time in two weeks we will be waking up again in our bed for the first time in 210 days.

We rolled on for what seemed like an eternity pulling into the Bang Bang rest area. I was kind of expecting Batman and Robin to be there beating up their arch rivals but instead there was just 10 other gray nomad vans set up for the evening. The boys rode while we chilled for a short time, chatting with some fellow travellers as they made their way to do their ablutions. Finally at 9:16 the last one turned off their generator so we could enjoy the silence, except for the tip tapping of the keys on my laptop, having FINALLY caught up to today on the blog! I think I’ll have a (another) rum to celebrate!

Day 197 – 21/6/14 – Normanton – Karumba Point QLD

Luckily we had booked into the van park yesterday, about the 2^nd time we have done it this trip, as we got the last available site. We did a bit of school work, drove the 70kms and rolled into Karumba at 10am. We set up and the boys found some new friends, the only other kids in the park, so they were off running around eventually ending up playing red rover on the dry mud/salt flats beside the park. 

We needed some fresh bread, get some supplies as we heard it was cheaper than Normanton and wanted to have a look at the Barramundi Discovery centre in town ( as we were camped at Karumba Point 15 minutes up the road) so we grabbed the boys and headed off. When we got there the supermarket was closed ( 12 on Saturday) the bakery was out of bread and the Barra centre was also closed. What a worthwhile trip that was! So we drove back out to the point, where the local supermarket has the bakery bread (Dooh), had lunch and let the boys loose again.

The wallabies were playing so at 2:30 I headed up to the Sunset tavern to watch the game. Getting it on was an ordeal as the bar lady had no idea what channel it was on, we found it on 10 but the digital reception was so bad you might as well have been watching a blank screen. Luckily at this moment Helen, one of the mothers from Jack’s rugby team messaged me and was able to confirm that it was on fox sports 2! Yeah! While the picture was far from perfect, it looked like it was snowing in Sydney, I happily settled in to watch the game. My next challenge was one of the barra fishing charters had placed an advertising TV on the was beside the one I was watching. On it was scene after scene of people catching massive barra. I sat there for the next 3 hours and I didn’t see the same scene twice....grrrrr....Oh yes and the Wallabies ended up whipping the frogs!

Which TV to watch?

I headed back to the van park ready for a good night. At this particular park they have a free fish BQ every Saturday night, starting at 6. At 4 De had messaged me to let me know they were already heaps of nomads heading up with their tables and chairs to get the best spot! So as soon as I  arrived we packed up and grabbed a spot next to some other ‘newbies’. Like many of the park in this part of the world they are inhabited by the same snow birds every year, with many of them coming back to the same site, for the same period for 10, 20 or 30 years. Along with the feed they put on a concert with a great old country and western singer leading the way.

The boys loved the song he sung about the room in the back of an old FJ, but I have the feeling they may have missed the meaning....hopefully anyway! Another lady sang some country songs but I was afraid she was gong to start to yodel but we were saved by an old bloke telling jokes. Towards the end the boys even went up and were the animals in a rousing rendition of Old MacDonalds Farm, sung by Connor who was somehow related to the new owners of the park.

Around 8:30 a few raffles were drawn including announcing the winner of the weeks fishing comp. Once they were drawn, despite the best efforts of some old ladies dancing to the Macarena the night was over. It was like 15 minutes before the bell at a Brisbane Lions (or Reds for that matter) game with everybody leaving en masse! I was pretty happy as despite it being early I was tired after a big afternoon of footy watching and was looking forward to a good nights sleep!

Just before the BBQ this bloke wondered past our site, and was pretty happy with his catch. He had been on one of the local charters and caught a feed, more than pretty much everybody else in the park. His biggest problem was that he didn't have a decent filleting knife. 15 minutes later we had them both filleted with my favorite knife and he was happy to donate a fillet for my troubles!

Day 196 – 20/6/14 - Leichardt River – Normanton QLD

Our last big stretch of dirt road lay in front of us. I am not certain but at a guess we must have done 2 -3000kms of dirt since we left Derby and with only 100kms standing in front of us.....until we get home.....we were all really looking forward to it. After a bit of schooling we packed up, let the tires down hopefully for the last time, and headed off. Ironically, apart from a couple of small parts of the Carpentaria highway, the Cape Laveque Rd and the road to Kingfisher Camp, this was the worst the worst of it. The road had been graded early in the season but due to rain just before the long weekend, its clay base was now cut up pretty badly. There were 4 crews trying to restore it but we were a few weeks early!

Not far from Normanton is Burke and Wills Camp 119, their final camp before they did one last three day sortie to try and spot water. They didn't make it, getting held back by the tangle of mangroves and it was February, the wet season, so I can only beging to imagine what it was like for these poor buggers. Around the camp they blazed (or branded) 14 (I think) trees with the camp number and B or BW in some places. Some of the trees are still there but only one that we could find that is living. It was pretty cool to be in same spot as these adventurers but reading their stories reminded us how harrowing it must have been for them.

We arrived in Normanton hopeful of finding a decent supermarket as old mother Hubbard’s cupboard was looking a touch empty. Unfortunately the combined food in the foodwerx and 4 square shop might have come close to a Brisbane corner shop and the prices were all fairly exorbitant. We bought a few necessities and after checking out the very informative information centre we checked out the big tourist attraction "Krys" a life size replica of the largest crocodile ever caught in the world. We had been somewhat scared of a 4.5m croc (in out 3.6m tinny) so I can only imagine how we would have felt seeing this behemoth sunning its self on the river bank! We then headed to the free camp just on the other side of the river.

They have pretty big floods in this part of the world.

A bit of Friday afternoon school work.

It was Friday and the boys had been behaving really well lately and doing a heap of school work so we decided to reward them by taking them on a pub crawl around Normanton. WHAT I hear you ask...well that is about all there is to do! They did quite enjoy themselves as they managed to get a ginger beer and some chips at the Albion as well as ogling at the pictures of crocs, barra and pigs that adorn the walls of the pub. 

We then moved onto the purple pub which wasn’t nearly as entertaining, but it was very very purple!

We headed back with the boys having a great time squashing beer cans on the front tyre of their bike that gets geld in place by the front fork. As the tyre goes around it rubs against the tyre making a terrible racket! I think Normanton was pretty happy that we had decided to go across the river to the free camp as you can’t complain if you haven’t paid for it!

After dinner the boys hit the hay as I attempted to catch up by uploading a plethora of blogs. We haven’t had decent reception since King Ash Bay, so even though I had a number of blogs written the complete lack of reception stopped the process!

Day 195 – 19/6/14 – Burketown – Leichardt River QLD

Around 9am, while we still lay in bed, we decided to be decadent and turn the TV on to watch some of the morning TV shows and news. It is the first time we have had the TV set up in the van, and working, since Geraldton in WA more than 2 months ago....and I can’t say we have missed much!

We were a little bit late to leave and then made another donation for some ridiculously over priced goods at the store. However we also bought a loaf of bread from the now world famous pork chop butcher and rolled out of town, covering a massive 70kms on bitumen before pulling up at the Leichardt River Crossing.

For those unfamiliar with the methodology of free camping, the gray nomads usually are gone by 8 or 9am driving for a few hours, having morning tea and then another hour or so before finding a spot to set up for lunch, AND the night, resulting in them always getting the prime sites. Our modus operandi is slightly different is we have a little sleep in and usually struggle to be moving by morning tea, stop somewhere for a late lunch and start to look for somewhere around 4, by which stage all the 'good' free sites are gone. I say 'good' as any 'fee' site is 'good'! However despite getting a late start we decided that was far enough, this looked like a nice spot, so we got (one) of the primes sites; there were already three other vans set up. We had lunch, had a nana nap, did a bit of school work and then the boys went off on an adventure while I attempted to catch up on my blogs! I gave grown to take pity on any cattle, or any living beings, that we camp near now as the boys are of on foot or on their bikes rounding them up with the whip cracking all the way.

In the afternoon we half heartedly threw a few lures in the puddle in front of our van, the boys went on an adventure on a long distance adventure on their bikes, as well as getting the fire going. It was a magical afternoon with the eastern sky painting a picture reflected in the still waters of the Leichardt infront of our camp...maybe the oldies have got this figured out! It had been a late night last night so it wasn’t long before we all turned in.