Nowhere!

We wound up in Normanton, and found the tip of nowhere.

Normanton felt isolated, looked isolated, and was indeed, an isolated place, made a little worse by the fact that we arrived on the weekend and everything except the tourist info/public library was closed. The only thing missing was tumble weed. The weather was hot, so we checked into a caravan park with a pool. There was mobile coverage too, so we worked at getting the blog right up to date and checking all mail and messages while we had the chance.

We had a very slow pack up, and headed out to get diesel, food for the coming week and make a visit to the library, because the kids always enjoy the space and some new books to look at. Well, the only shop that sold fuel on a Sunday, was out of diesel, and we probably... had enough to get to the Burke and Wills roadhouse. Hmmm...a few ideas were mooted, stay an extra day and hope somewhere had fuel in the morning, drive 70km to Karumba (aye karumba!) and hope not to burn too much on the way back...in the end, the caravan park lady asked around a couple of people to see if they would sell a Gerry can full, to get us over the hump. Well, that did the trick and after a very long and partly fruitful trip to Foodworks to stock up, we hit the library for half an hour before heading down the developmental road to the roadhouse.

The Burke and Wills Roadhouse had a much more international flavour than Normanton, with backpackers filling a lot of the jobs. The girl on the front counter was from Finland! We did a load of washing, and had a chat with a grave old couple camped near us, about Lawn Hill. The quote of the day was the old guy saying "you will have damage" referring to the road in, and that our caravan "would never be the same". They left early the next morning, and the woman from the other old couple staying next to us said "don't worry too much, you'll be ok. They are like a pair of old women! They're doing adventurous things but they're not very adventurous".  This made us laugh but also a little more comfortable as the doomsday prophets had been working us hard all afternoon.

We hit the road to head deeper into nowhere for one night and catch up with the Spences.  We arrived at Gregory Downs to find basically nothing other than a pub and a couple of houses. The free camp just nearby was magic though! It was right beside the Gregory river, and that made all the difference in this arid dusty part of Australia. It was amazing in this environment to have so much fresh water gushing by.

The first order of the day was floating down the river, and so the kids duly made lap after lap, running up the bank again before jumping in and floating down to the stop point. It required some vigilance on the part of the grown ups, to make sure that nobody went too close to the underwater logs on one side and became tangled.

Late in the afternoon, one of our neighbours came out with some bread to feed the black kites. Feeding native animals bread is usually not my thing, but it was pretty special to see these large birds of prey swooping down and either catching the food or deftly grabbing it from the surface of the water that flowed so swiftly by.  Amazing!

The boys spent a part of the afternoon very industriously searching for firewood. It was great to see them so busy with a task, backwards and forwards over the river. We finished the evening by lighting a fire, something the kids had been longing to do for ages. It was a little spirited at first, but soon died down to a manageable blaze, just right for toasting a few marshmallows.

This part of nowhere was a really beautiful place.