Cloncurry

Today we set off for Mackinlay which is between Longreach and Cloncurry, and decided to keep coming up the road here to Cloncurry for the night.  We got up early this morning and packed up ready to hit the road again.  We said farewell to Mike and Helen Shaw who have been great company - we had a lovely night in their van last night while the girls played with their Polly Pockets in the camper trailer.  We were only going to stay for a half hour or so but 2 hours later we went out the door of their van and into our tent to discover the girls had packed up and taken themselves to bed!  We felt like naughty teenagers creeping into bed not waking anyone up.  We travelled to Mackinlay - the home of Walkabout Creek Hotel where they filmed Crocodile Dundee.  It is truly in the middle of nowhere.  We drove most of the day through complete nothingness.  Absolute isolation.  We took the obligatory photos which I was hoping to load to the blog tonight but I am tucked up in the tent and the cable is somewhere in the boot of the Prado so it will be another day before I load photos for you all to see.  We were thinking of staying overnight at Walkabout Creek in the Hotel's van park but it was still quite early in the afternoon so a family vote resulted in us moving on to Cloncurry for the night.  We are booked into Mt Isa for the next 3 nights which is a tiny 120 km's up the road so it will be a very nice slow start tomorrow with a before lunch arrival in the Isa before we set about exploring it.  We are all having a great time.  Life in the car is very agreeable apart from listening to Qld AM radio, ( a very bad gardening show today where the solution to all gardening problems was prefaced with "well love" or "well mate", followed by the advice of "chucking some chook poo" or "sprinkling  human urine", pronounced  you-rine, - these two solutions are guaranteed to fix all plant issues - Mal reckons it is a killer cure - how to kill your plants in one hit).  The sun streams in through the windscreen and today the outside temperature rose to 24 degrees.  It is very cold at night though out here in the west and we have had 3 sub zero nights.  Tonight it will be about 8 degrees overnight but we have a powered site and run a little heater to keep us toasty warm.