The final day in Darwin today, and third last day in the NT. Our Volkswagen Tiguan, named Estelle, is getting close to the next required service. It would probably arrive at some point next week, based on kilometres driven. Aside from here in Darwin, Cairns is probably the only other place we could get it serviced between here and home – and given we had spare time here, and we really don’t have any in Cairns, I booked the car…
We’re sitting in the Daly Waters Pub at the moment. Daly Waters is on the lands of the Jingili people, who are the traditional owners of the land around here – south to Renner Springs and north to Newcastle Waters. We acknowledge their ownership of this land, and their elders past, present and emerging. This is such a wonderful place! It’s really remote – but it feels like you’re down at your local. Plenty of cabins, plus a huge caravan…
From one roadhouse / pub to another! The Barkly Homestead is looking pretty polished – from what I’ve read, it’s essentially brand new, after some significant renovations over the past few months or so to get ready for this dry season. I think it was planned, but it certainly became more necessary after they got hit really hard by floods and storms in December 2022. The result is a very nice looking roadhouse for the first and last pub in…
Today we’ve made it into Queensland! And this evening we’ve arrived in Mount Isa, which is the traditional lands of the Kalkadoon people. We acknowledge their elders past, present and emerging. Aside from that little tyre hiccup back down in Victoria, we’ve had a great run with our VW Tiguan, Estelle, on this trip! That was, until this afternoon. But more on that soon… We headed off from Barkly Homestead at about 9am – not as much of a rush…
Happy birthday, Debbie! We’re back to cold nights here in Mount Isa. It took us a bit by surprise, and everyone was a little cold during the night – so sleep wasn’t the greatest. But we still tired to make time this morning to shower birthday love on Debbie. We have a notebook that we write each other’s birthday messages in (in place of cards), and so the kids and I had written in that in the last couple of…
Originally the plan today was to head down the road to Cloncurry, and also drop into Mary Kathleen on the way. But while the Macgyver fix on the sunroof is holding really well, as I mentioned yesterday, the windscreen crack is still getting bigger. So I wasn’t really keen on putting more stress on it by driving down the freeway… and also just keen to keep the drives as close to a home base as possible for now. We dropped…
We were hoping to be heading east today, towards Hughenden. But here we still are in Mount Isa! The caravan park have been great with trying to find us somewhere to stay – because seemingly everywhere in Mount Isa has no vacancies! But we’ve got a little cabin here – just super simple with beds, a table, and a tv and that’s about it. But it’ll certainly do for another day or two! This morning I spent a bit of…
Still here. But in good news: the windscreen is all fixed, and the sunroof is patched up properly! 🎉 I received the long awaited phone call at about 10:30am this morning – the windscreen had arrived on the truck and I could bring the car in to have it fitted over the next few hours! They were even able to drop us down into town before they took the car back up to the workshop, which was super handy. We…
We’re on the lands of the Yirandali people tonight, in the area they knew as Mokana (what is now known as Hughenden). We’d also like to acknowledge the Wunumara people, whose land we travelled through today as we headed east through Cloncurry and Julia Creek. We’d like to pay our respects to the elders of both groups – past, present and those leaders being raised up. It was a fairly long day of driving today – another 500km+ day. After…
We’re currently in the beautiful Undara National Park, which is the lands of the Ewamian (pronounced ‘Oo-wamin’) people. The Ewamian people have lived on this land for tens of thousands of years, and utilised the lava tubes for many parts of life. We pay our respects to the Ewamian elders past, present and emerging. We headed off from Hughenden pretty early – we managed to make it on the road by 7am, which was my aim. That meant we’d hopefully…