May 9, driving from Three Ways to Mount Isa. May 10, Mt Isa, Cloncurry and north

Long day of driving up the Barkly Tablelands. We started out in scrub and small trees. Past Barkly Homestead, a roadhouse, to Queensland. Camooweal, just over the border was like a lot of the stops along the outback highways. Some are just gas stations with a roadhouse serving beer and food and often a motel and caravan park. Camooweal had a post office / supermarket and some old buildings from its days as a stop for cattle herds going east. This is still cattle country. There were great stretches of grassland with few or no trees. There aren't so many cattle out now because of the drought. They had a very dry rainy season and have been selling off the cattle.

Closer to Mt Isa we ran into hills and rocky outcrops. Mt Isa was a mining town. To the west of the main highway there were four mines and smelters for iron, silver and lead. The tall smoke stacks dominated that half of the town. The other part of town was a jumble of newish shopping centers and houses. It was a fairly large town of 13,000. And it's the home of Greg Norman.

Our gps stopped working. Suddenly there weren't any maps on the screen, just the car icon and a direction. Then it stopped all together. We used the town map to find a liquor store. It was drive thru, but we walked it. We just had to tell the woman at the counter what we wanted and she retrieved it. Then we found a campground and tucked ourselves in.

I opened up the storage bin under the bench at the dining table to look for something. And I discovered a swarm of ants. It took some time cleaning that up. Don't know if we got them all.

May 10, Mt Isa, Cloncurry and north

We made a couple of stops in Mt Isa. The first at Riversleigh Fossil Display. The fossil bed itself is several hundred kilometers northwest, but they had an interpretive center here. They discovered 20 million years of fossils at Riversleigh. They found fossils of meat eating kangaroos, a giant marsupial, big flightless bird and others that hadn't been found anywhere else. There was one large snake named Montypythonoides.

We took the GPS to an electronics store and found that it had a bad power cord. Problem solved.

Next was an underground hospital. It was built in WWII, with the help of the mining company, but was never used as a hospital. Later nurses used it for sleeping during the hot summers. It was a small E- shaped space with room for maternity and pediatric wards, men's ward and operating theater.

In the early days of Mt Isa all the buildings were corrugated metal and tent fabric. Only one remains and it was being restored. The worker let us go in and it was remarkably large inside and cool too.

On the road again. We fueled up in Cloncurry. That was where the Royal Flying Doctors Service began. It also was the site of the first Qantas hangar. Here we turned north on the Burke Developmental Highway. The road was just an average 2 lane highway for a long time, going through hills and then trees and grasslands. As we went further north though, the road narrowed to one lane with dirt on the sides. When we met another car, both of us had to take to the dirt, but keep 2 wheels on the road, just in case the dirt was soft. It alternated between 2 lane and single lane all the way to Normanton.

We were going to stop by the river, but the dirt road looked too loose, so we stopped by a picnic area nearby. We watched the sunset, and while we were eating we could see the bats coming out of the trees. maybe they were flying foxes, they were big. Now it's dark and the little bugs are going crazy getting in here after the light. It's hot, so if we close the windows to keep the bugs out, we swelter. Best bet is to turn out the lights and go to bed.

Pictures - Samson at Barkly Homestead, Eastern Northern Territory, Queensland, Camooweal Post Office, Mount Isa Smelter, Underground hospital, Tent House, Chinamans Dam (lunch spot),
Hotel in Cloncurry, Burke Development Road, Krys the Crocodile, Sunset in Normanton