Day 62
Barkly Homestead - Camoweal - Mount Isa - Cloncurry
"can we pretend that airplanes in the night sky are shooting stars, I could really use a wish right now......."
Saw a shooting star tonight in the clear sky surrounded by millions of stars!
It was cold this morning! Well cold for us on this trip. We've gotten used to the 30 degree days and so to be 6 degrees this morning was a cruel reality check for us!
We rolled out of Barkly at 7.30 ready for another full day of driving. Firstly to the NT/QLD border and to apparently gain 5 years and 30 minutes (or so the sign at Camoweal says!) and then onto Mount Isa.
The drive from Barky Homestead to Camoweal is actually quite boring! The country turns into a sea of wild grasses and that's it for miles around . It's great to look at for the first 3 minutes but hours later it's still there!
We stopped and had a photo at the border and continued on to have lunch at a rest area about 50ks from Mt Isa which commemorates the Isa - Camoweal road that was laid during WW2 to get supplies across to the NT and our 'front line'.
There isn't really much to do in Mt Isa! If you're not here for mining or in a business that supports mining then you won't last long here. We shopped and fuelled and did a quick drive thru and that's all! We'd stopped here for a few days on our last visit and so didn't need to revisit anything.
We headed out of town towards Cloncurry and we are stopping tonight in a free camp 60ks from Cloncurry called Fountain Springs. We dumped one of the vans there and drove back 3ks to Mary Kathleen - the uranium mine that Phillip worked at in the late 70's. It's a ghost town now - no buildings remain - just roads and concrete foundations. Production ceased in 1984 and with that the mine closed and was sold off. The old open cut uranium mine is now filled with water that is turquoise blue - presumably from the copper leaching into the water.
Tomorrow we have another big day of driving. First into Cloncurry itself and then to turn North once again for the Gulf - Normanton and Karumba for a few days.