Bedourie - Mt Isa

I haven't written for a few days, and I already have to think hard to what's been happening!

From Bedourie we headed to Boulia, home of the min min light. We went to the expedition which was interesting, the kids were scared but it was all good fun. After that we we to the stone house museum, a national trust property with a shed of aquatic reptile fossils. Apparently there's a 23 foot plesiosaur in boxes in another shed, but the palaeontologist Dinosaur Dick, died a few years ago and no one is around to put it together. 

We arrived in mt is a in time to pick up the caravan keys, which were the right ones to open the weber hatch. The bbq has survived remarkably well in there, lucky H strapped it well and put it on some cushioning.

After we picked up the keys, we went and did some shopping at Kmart.

Back at camp we reheated some frozen spag Bol and had a drink with our camp neighbours, Mandy and roger. Lovely people. They had a small dog that the kids loved to walk and a tamed love bird.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Birdsville

Waddi trees

H at pub

Kids and I hung at caravan

C2 and H sat around fire, amazingly clear night.

Quiet day at Tibooburra

It's now 1.15 and we haven't done much today. It's been lovely! The kids all scattered into the rocks while we sat around the fire, bbqed some steaks for breakfast and put some scones cooking in the camp oven for lunch. At home, the kids all spend too much time in front of screens. They still have screens with them here, one of the perks of the caravan, but surprisingly and reassuringly, they prefer mucking about outside. The girls were using the pocket knife this morning to whittle, and the boys made a snare to trap 'something'.

At the moment, I am on a walk but saw a flat rock and came to lie on it. I've come across cows, goats and a donkey so far. Our camp is on the old Aboriginal reserve, which is attached to the common. It's unbelievable to think of how people were treated not that long ago. In the 60's, the Aboriginals of this land were driven out on trucks to the mission in Brewarrina, never to return. 

 

Tibooburra - Milparinka - Tibooburra

I'm sitting in front of the fire at camp. I should have a drink in my hand, but my body is protesting and I can't move. It's pretty icy and windy at the moment.

We are camping at the Aboriginal Lands Council for $15/night. The scenery is beautiful; Tibooburra means 'heap of rocks', and where we are camping is a nature's playground of climbing rocks for the kids. No one else is here tonight, so our 4 and our friends' 2 have disappeared. They'll be back when dinner is ready! Camp oven curry tonight.

Today we drove out to Milparinka, a historical village consisting of a pub, no more than a few houses and a couple of ruins. The old house, that used to be the post office, belonged to a family in the 1800's. The boys had normal names (Jack, mick and Ross I think), but the girls' names were interesting - Girly and Bub were two of them. 

After lunch at the pub, we drove out to Mount Poole were Charles Sturt and his expedition were stuck for months during the drought in 1845. To stop the team becoming bored, he set them the task of building a large stone pyramid on the top of a hill. There would have been no shortage of rocks!! We climbed right up to the top to see the 'cairn', and it was one of those times I wished I was just a little fitter. The walk just kept going and going, we were spread from the bottom of the hill to almost the top. C4 found a fossil of something in a rock.

After the exhausting walk, we drove to see Poole's grave. Poole was the second in command on the expedition, (spelled seccond in command on his gravestone), and died of scurvy. There were two other graves in the area; one was of a boy Carlyon Murray, who was 11 and 8 months when he died in 1924 and the other was his mother who had died in 1922. C1 is very interested to find out how they passed, so I had to record their details.

So now we are back, and I'm sensing an early night. 

Narromine - Tibooburra

I'll have to add words later, because I realised (after 11 hours in the car) that not everything can be captured by the camera. But here are the photos... Adding cardboard to our arsenal, to protect from rocks breaking the rear screen.

 We had spoken to someone the night before and was assured the road was 'beautiful mate, like highway' ...

 Yep, only about 500km of this!

 Stop at Wanaaring

 Assured the road was good...

Some of the road was not so great, but there were side roads to direct away from the puddles.

 

 

"Mum can I take my boots off and run in the sand?!"

 

 

 

We were trying to avoid driving in the dark, but at this point, we were never going to avoid it. Might as well enjoy the scenery! 

 

C2 left a message for future travellers

 

The sunset that can't be captured by camera. 

 

 

And we are off!

We were supposed to leave 3 days ago, but wow, so much to do. The kids and I slept in the van last night, in the driveway, because we'd packed all of the bedding in there and thought it wouldn't be a bad idea to see if we would need anything else when we were a little further away from the comforts of home. C2 ended up in my bed, and I decided that buying a kettle to go on the gas stove was essential to me getting out of bed in the mornings. 

Right now we are only an hour and a bit into the journey. It's cold and wet, and the dogs are stinking up the car at regular intervals. Made our ham and cheese rolls a little less enjoyable 😷 c1 and 3 have written in their travel journals already, but mostly everyone is playing technology. I'm testing this blog app I have - I hope I haven't published it 5 times!! Even though we changed to Telstra, service still sucks.

 I'm not having much luck posting this, maybe it'll be stuck on drafts until we get wifi?

We are here now, after a long 8.5 hours. It never usually takes us that long, but our old girl had an upset stomach this morning so we stopped a few more times just in case. The roads were often wet, with flooding in the nearby paddocks, and it was raining on and off. The car was great, I had to tell h that the speed limit for towing is actually only 100km/hour, because he was cruising along at the 110 speed limit.

With every stop, we also had a little walking try and find some Pokemon. Pokemon go is like a virtual geocache of Pokemon, and while I'm still figuring it out, it's a fun distraction from the driving.

 

The old girl might not see home again :(

 

 

Banjo has no respect for Charles Sturt! This showed up as a Pokemon gym, so the kids and I ran across the highway to see what that meant. Turns out I need to level-up before I can fight lol

C2's upper molar fell victim to a Redskin lolly. 

Getting closer!

So we have the van! It didn't go off without a hitch (haha, there's a pun there - pick up involved a lot of work around the tow bar/ball of the car to match the DC035 hitch on the van), but the beast is now home and in the process of being packed. There is so much to learn about the electronics of it all. C4 managed to get a DVD stuck in his player within 10 minutes of being allowed to explore inside yesterday, and the kids spent most of the day in there. It's raining, so it was good to know if it rains on the trip, we could still be comfortable.

Look at those happy faces :)

I lined the cupboards and draws with non-stick matting yesterday, to help stop marks from things moving around in there. I need to buy a few more containers today, and H needs to fit the Clearview mirrors onto the car. They arrived yesterday, as did the walkie talkie things. We've tried to buy second hand and/or locally, so things have needed to arrive by post.

The original plan was Narromine - Bourke - Tibooburra - Cameron Corner - Tibooburra - Innamincka - Birdsville, but I just found this:

from here:
http://www.dpti.sa.gov.au/OutbackRoads/outback_road_conditions/area_4_strzelecki_and_birdsville_track

meaning that it looks like the road we'd take to Innamincka is closed. Since we have left travel so late, and it looks like we'll be doing it ourselves (in a new van, that we don't know the capabilities/limitations of), this makes me nervous. If we can't get into, or out of, Innamincka, does that mean we'll be stuck at Tibooburra until the roads all open?

Testing

 

Today is the day!

There was a chance we'd pick up the beast yesterday, but all things conspired against us (banks and government services), and we had to put it off just one more day. Instead we went into Echuca and picked up a little Weber Baby Q - yes, it should be able to feed us all! - and a few other things (mothballs and mice bait) to keep the house pest free in our absence. The kids all have to clean their bedrooms today, because I've warned them if they don't, the rats and roaches will be fully set up in their rooms when we return.

I took the travel books with us in the car yesterday, and had a bit of a better look at where we are going. Our first stop will be in Narromine, to drop off the dogs. We are a bit worried one of them won't last the Winter, so that will be a sad farewell, and I'm generally going to miss having them around. We did consider taking the younger one with us, but in the end we decided that he would probably inhibit where we could stay (no national parks, for example), so he's just having a holiday with family.

Our second stop was going to be Tibooburra, to meet friends who have 2 kids the same ages as our youngest 2 (their birthdays are within weeks of each other, so they are pretty good friends). It's disappointing that there was such a delay in getting the van, because we were already supposed to be there with them. The plan was to explore a bit of that Corner country, and drive up to Innamincka together, but every day that passes means that's less likely (and H has to buy our friend a 6-pack/day!). When I had a good look at the map yesterday, I noticed that the road between Bourke and Tibooburra is unsealed, not just a minor road like I thought. 450km of unsealed and unfamiliar road is probably better to drive in daylight, and it's also probably better to set up the van for the first time in daylight as well. So it looks like our second stop will be in Bourke.

I need to figure out how to post from my phone, and add photos.

The story so far

Copied from another post, copied from another post ;)


Lots, and yet reading back on the posts from the last 8, EIGHT!!, years, not a lot. We still lose remotes and mummy is still crazy. I still have problems with blogging - I unfaithfully tried to start another blog for a trip we are about to do (more on that later...), but none of the other blog site formats appealed to me. You win, blogger, you win.

So, we are about to embark on a 'big holiday'. Husband (I can't remember what I called him, in the more recent posts, for privacy - I know I call the kids c1, c2 etc, would H1 be appropriate?!) has taken next term off with long service leave, and since I'm casual teaching this year, I've made myself unavailable. I did think that we would be more prepared, since I wasn't contracted to work this year, but as it happened I worked a fair bit and we are not prepared at all! I'm in denial, but we are also stalled by the fact our caravan won't even be ready for a few days. I think once it comes, and we can pack it, it will feel more real.

I'll find the other blog thing I started and copy the into post - since I wrote that, we extended the 9 weeks to 15 (but that's going to be more like 14 by the time we head off).

Since our last big trip almost 5 years ago, one thing has changed - these kids are now so grown up! Not only do they physically take up a lot more space, which could be an issue given the number of hours we are going to spend in the car together, but they have their own ideas about what they would like to get out of this trip. We are also conscious of taking them out of school for almost one whole term - they are in Year 2, 4, 5 and 6 this year - but we are hoping by involving them in the planning of the trip, using the blog as a kind of travel diary and maybe accessing work through their school, what they learn will exceed the expectations of the curriculum. Hoping!
So far, what we know, is that we have about 9 weeks of travel ahead of us. We are heading to Broome, and then heading south and following along the bottom of Australia until we get home. The biggest question for us at the moment is whether to go on the Tanami Track to Broome from Alice Springs, or to head north until Daly Waters before heading west. This is just a basic map I found, to show the different ways, I wouldn't mind going across the top, and seeing the Devil's Marbles (Karlu Karlu) and Mataranka again, but we are mindful of running out of time. I'm not sure which way would take us closer to the Bungle Bungles (Purnululu), but I think we should make that happen.

And since I wrote this, we were lucky enough to be able to trade in the Jayco and buy a new van. It's a big'n.


About Us

If you are here, there's a fair chance that you have been given this blog address and you already know all about us.
Since this is the world wide web, we've made a few name changes. I'm going to leave it up to the kids to name themselves (their bios will be below), and we will just known as Mum and Dad.
This is the last year before Miss 12 starts high school, so we are cashing in some of Dad's long service leave and hitting the road! Our last big trip was up to Darwin almost 5 years ago (see pics, when they were all so little), and I hope this trip can be just as amazing and memorable.
We travel by 'The Stormtrooper', our Landcruiser 4WD, and hopefully we'll all still manage to sleep in the smallest Jayco ever.

So I might try to record some of the memories from the trip in here. I'll be uploading pics galore to facebook, but this will be my place to write things that will help me relive this trip, 8 years into the future.

Almost there now

We'd had a very full-on 2 years. Once the dust had settled from 2015, we decided that this would be the year H would take long service and we would put the Stormtrooper (our Landcruiser) to good use. At the time, we owned a Jayco Finch and figured we could set that up with a few modifications to enable free camping all the way to WA (Broome has long been my dream). I had my reservations about the old Finch, considering we haven't fit in there comfortably for a few years now, and as time got closer (and nobody seemed to be getting any smaller!), a stroke of good fortune put us in a position to buy a new van, if we wanted to...

Some people would undoubtedly think we were crazy. New caravans aren't cheap, and we had to buy new to accommodate our requirements. Our ideas on what we wanted actually fluctuated on a scale between a hard-floor camper trailer, designed to sleep 2 (the kids could sleep in swags) and a fully decked out beast (to sleep, shower, toilet and entertain the lot of us). There was one camper trailer styled van that could do everything for us, but was such a new design and for so much money that we just weren't sure. We originally thought that by buying new, we'd be able to walk into a caravan lot and say "We'll take that one!", drive-away, no more to pay, but it doesn't actually work like that. Since buying a van had only become a possibility in May, we were running out of time which knocked out a few contenders. The camper trailer to sleep 6 was one of those (it was a Bruder-6), JB Scorpion another, Jayco Basestation another...

By another stroke of good fortune, H had to have a small operation (that's not the fortunate part), and I went to visit the caravan yards there in the city. I came across a design that I loved; it wasn't in an offroad van (another of our requirements), but from the moment I walked in, I could just imagine us all in there. After speaking to the guy, who spoke to his boss-guy, who spoke to the engineer-guy, who spoke to the manufacturing-guys, it was determined we COULD have a new van ready by the end of June. But we only had 2 days to decide.

We didn't win the lottery, and we don't generally have a lot of money to throw around (4 kids will do that to a family), so this was a huge decision. Because H was still off work, recovering, we had those 2 decision days to really think about what we wanted. In the end, we decided that this had happened in perfect timing to support our travel plans; the 'trip of a lifetime' so many people wait to do until retirement to do (and we may also do again in 20 years, but nothing in life is guaranteed). We had often thought about upgrading the Finch, and it would be silly to squeeze everything into it for this trip, only to upgrade later. I'd learned from the research phase that second-hand family vans aren't that easy to come by, so there is always the option of selling it once we do return. So here it is, our Masterpiece Optimum - due to be handed over tomorrow, and then we can pack and begin our adventure... (ok, so I can't find the pictures on my computer, TBC...)