Blogs from Camooweal, Queensland, Australia, Oceania

Our destination today was the remote Barkly Homestead, in the Northern Territory, located on the Barkly Highway between Camooweal, Qld, and Tennant Creek, NT. It is a true oasis in the desert. A beautiful place. Clean and very well organised. We stopped at Camooweal and walked the very small community which was once a major player with cattle droving. The new, huge bridge at Camooweal spreads across the wide Georgina River, one of the 3 major rivers of the Channel country, which eventually flow into Lake Eyre. New, upgraded roadworks were noted too. Our drive took us through mainly uninhabited land used for cattle grazing. Hence, it was the occasional station homestead sometimes visible from the road. The rolling plains of grassland seemed never-ending with the colour of the landscape changing constantly. There were many road ... read more

Continued from Part 4... Day 14: We are up just after 8:00. Today will be a long day on the road. We pack our things and load the van. After a little breakfast we bid farewell to our host and hit the Stuart Highway around 9:30. We are basically going to see how far we can go today. The only thing we actually want to see is the Devil’s Marbles, about 400 km north on the side of the road. Other than that, all we will see is this long flat road. North of Alice Springs we see something that I had heard about, but thought was just a legend: a no speed limit zone. There is literally no speed limit. It’s called an “open speed” area and the sign urges you to drive to the ... read more

Our thoughts turned westward as did our mechanised home as we said our farewells to Margaret, John and hopefully the black snake. Well not quite westward yet, a detour to the Cairns Regional Gallery was considered a must by the tour director. Eventually we tackled the Kuranda range and commenced the western leg of this years journey but managed only 110 kms to Rocky Creek war memorial park just short of Atherton whose thoughtful council supplied the park but also a place to park the motorhome and trailer right outside the laundromat. Laundry complete, ever westward, with an uninspiring overnight stop at Archer Creek rest area, a misnomer as all night Megan listened to the road trains coming down the hill under exhaust brakes waiting for one to leave the road and land ontop of the ... read more

Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 After being towed 120km to Camooweal on the evening of Friday 19 October (the credit card will be recovering for some time!), we spent the weekend sitting it out at one... read more

May 2011 - We’ve been here at this 220000 acre cattle station in Western Queensland for nearly 5 weeks as work continues and we’ll probably stay here longer as required. Murray and Dave made and positioned the new water tower in four days and lifted the tank up, connected up the pipes and have fixed up the old tower. Also on the agenda has been mustering, both on quad bike and horseback (made DC very happy), branding, ear tagging and castrating (wince!), sourcing parts and fixing the various vehicles here (trucks, motorbikes, cherry picker, loader; (Once a mechanic – always a mechanic); putting out new troughs and doing the plumbing, feeding poddy calves (orphans) boiling up mung beans to give to the cows as a distraction while the poddy calves feed, fixing dodgy septic tanks, etc. ... read more