Lawn Hill National Park

What a wonderful find this was.  This was one place that we had been told about before we left home and it lived up to all expectations.  Lawn Hill was beautiful and so were the camp grounds at Adele's Grove.

Evan's diary entry:

Today we're at Lawn Hill.
While we were in Lawn Hill we went canoeing, swimming in the cascades and park and camping ground gorge.

Sarah made a bow but it broke.

I made one too.  It lasted. Every target I hit on the spot.

It's a good bow.

My Diary Entry:

We went for a walk in the Lover Gorge at Lawn Hill National Park and visited Dog Dreaming.  It was an Aboriginal cave with paintings.  They were no where near as impressive as the ones at Carnarvon Gorge.

We had lunch and then progressed down to the cascades for a well deserved swim.  It is very hot.  The water was beautifully warm.

The children made bows and arrows based on their imaginations being piqued from reading Eragon.  The trees at the camp ground at Adele's Grove were well suited to making bows.  They pretended to go hunting with them and practise their archery skills.
Evan and Harry looked very funny with their "armour" on: a few layers of t-shirts, undies on their heads and socks on their hands - Classic!

9/5/07

Today we spent 1 1/4 hours paddling up Lawn Hill Gorge. The spectacular red cliffs on either side were beautiful.

To start, Steve, Evan and Harry went in the three man canoe.  They looked surprisingly like  the Berenstain bear father and his 2 cubs as they rowed out from shore.  Sarah and I shared the second canoe.  I started out in the front and could not for the life of me control the thing.  We stopped and swapped places - it made a HUGE difference.  There must be some physics based rule as to why it is best to have the weight in the back of the canoe, not the front.

We paddled up to the falls and got out and had a swim in the beautiful warm water.  On the way back Sarah, Evan and I paddled back in the big canoe and Steve and Harry took the small one.

It was a lot of fun.



Mt Isa

Well what can you say about Mt Isa?  What a disappointment for us.  Our family trip had been humming along beautifully up to this point. Then we pulled into the much fabled Mt Isa and found very little to recommend it.  It was busy, smelly, expensive, and as we were to later find out, a hot bed of crime.

I'll relate Evan's diary entry first as it quite succinctly sums up the place:

At Mount Isa we went to Sunset Top Tourist Park.  It was expensive.

We went to the library and found lots of crochet books to photocopy. But when we left we had our mobile phone stolen.  We also had Sarah's MP3 player, $91 and some other things stolen.

We left Mt Isa quickly.


My diary for Mt Isa:

3/5/07
We packed up camp and arrived in Mt Isa. We are not overly impressed with the town.  The Information Centre ladies took one look at me and announced that absolutely no way can we bush camp in Mt Isa, we must stay at a caravan park.

We booked in at Sunset Caravan Park.  It has a pool which is good, because it is quite hot.  Once again tent campers are shoved down the back on dodgy ground with no tap and the furtherest away from the camp kitchen and pool.  Ironically it is the campers who are the ones who use the camp kitchen facilities, but they are always the ones sited the furtherest away.  Well, at least we had shade for most of the day.

We went shopping for Steve's birthday....

4/5/07

Steve's 41st Birthday

We had bacon and eggs for brekkie and cooked a cake for Steve in the camp kitchen gas oven.  Well tried to anyway, but managed to burn it instead.

The park has an air conditioned room with a TV.  We watched Eragon, Evan bought the DVD yesterday.  Both Sarah and Evan have been reading Eragon as we have been travelling.

We collected the mail and then went to the library. Just as it was starting to sound like a ho hum day, reading mail, writing emails, photocopying some crochet books; drama unfolded when we discovered that Sarah's little handbag had been stolen!  Sarah had recently had a birthday and she was loaded up with birthday money from her newly opened mail.  She had $91 and an MP3 player in her bag that was stolen.  We searched the library to no avail.

Later that afternoon, I discovered that my mobile phone was missing.  We realised that this too must have been stolen while were at the library.  We tried calling it but it was out of credit.  The buggers had used up all $30 of credit on it.

We reported the thefts to the police but they held very little hope that we would ever find our goods again.  I'm pretty sure that once we walked out of the door they filed our complaint under B for bin.

We decided that Mt Isa was not the place for us so we decided to pack up and move on fairly quickly once we had replenished our camping supplies.

It seems that we were so underwhelmed with Mt Isa that we don't even seem to have any photos of our time there.  Maybe it's a good thing, because if we had have gotten our camera out it too might have been stolen.

On Sunday the 6th we packed up and left Mt Isa for Riversleigh fossils.  We had a short walk through some fossils, there was not much to see really.  It showcased giant crocodiles and thunderbirds that lived around 20 million years ago - the period of mega fauna after the dinosaurs had died out.

We continued on our journey and will continue in the next blog about what happened when we got to Adele's Grove at Lawn Hill.