Heading for the West

Day 18 saw us leave Katherine and make for Three Ways. We had planned to go south a slightly different way - through Cape Crawford and then down to Barkly Homestead and then through Camooweal to Mt Isa - but fuel stops and accommodation was an issue. And the distances that we would have had to do made it a little unfeasible with the kids. So instead, we retraced our steps to almost Tennant Creek stopping at the Three Ways Roadhouse for the night instead. This was the first night in a while that it has not been humid and I think we slept without the a/c on!! Distance travelled: 613kms

Road trains at Three Ways

Leaving Three Ways on day 19, we headed straight for Mt Isa. The only place you pass through before you hit the Qld border is Barkly Homestead and it is only 187kms into the trip!

But one little strange place we passed through - and stopped for lunch (a sandwich in the caravan) - was Avon Downs. What made this place so strange was that it consisted of a property (that we didn't see) but also a largish police station. In the middle of nowhere! There was still 50+kms to go before the border, and Barkly was about 200kms west!

Avon Downs police station

We are not sure why this place exists so if anyone knows, post a comment!

Baby in NT; Sam in Qld

Sam at the Queensland border

We pulled into Mt Isa at about 6pm and headed straight for the caravan park. A bit of a mishap tonight....Mark decided (unknowingly) to see just how waterproof his mobile phone was. He thought he'd checked his pockets before plunging into the deep end of the pool, but obviously not well enough. After 5 minutes, he discovered the phone. Oh oh! There was no display and when he opened the back, an awful lot of water came out of it. We joked that it is water resistant to 1.9m but Mark went to 2m so that is what stuffed it! Tonight, we treated the kids to Macca's - this is the first fast food we've had on the trip. Distance travelled: 637kms

Day 20 and whilst we would have liked to get an early start, we had to wait for the Telstra shop to open to get another phone. Because although I have mine (and Mark's sim card did work in my phone, so that wasn't stuffed), I don't have the cables, software etc to allow us to use it to get onto the internet to do important things like updating the blog!! We got away with buying just a prepaid phone and swapping the sim cards. At the rate that he goes through phones, I reckon he should just stick with the prepaid handsets and run the plan through the sim!! We eventually left Mt Isa at around 10.30am and headed for Winton. Remember the pub in the movie "Crocodile Dundee"? The Walkabout Creek Hotel? Well we passed by it in a nondescript placed called McKinlay.

It is obvious that it was only the hotel scenes that were shot here, because the surrounds are almost farmland rather than outback....nothing like I remember from the movie. Now, I have to admit that the visit to Winton and surrounds was purely so we could take young Tom to see the dinosaur exhibits at the newly opened 'Age of Dinosaur's centre and maybe also visit Lark Quarry Dinosaur Trackways. We didn't say anything to him about this just in case we didn't even make it here. And just as well, because on our arrival this afternoon, we discovered that the bloody cyclone that has been dumping a crapload of rain in the gulf region also dumped a fair bit around here and the roads to the dinosaurs are all cut off!!!

The road to Lark Quarry....flooded

Something that the flood waters threw up! Killed just before we saw it!

I could cry. But what do you do? There are some dino exhibits here in town and we will take him to those. Maybe, if this dino fever he has keeps going over the next few years, we might fly him to Longreach, get a hire car and drive him to Winton to see them. But it ain't going to happen this trip sadly. Distance travelled: 467kms