Day 33: Bang Bang Rest Area – Normanton – Karumba

If you cast your minds back a couple of weeks, you will recall that I sent out a “mayday” call for some book suggestions.

While I am sure that you have all been worried sick about whether I found something, MBW had my back and suggested Tom Thread-someone. He has two series’ of books – the female Texas homicide detective (2 books) and the male FBI special agent (3 books).

Well it’s an indication of how much I like an author as to how hard it is to put the book down. And when I say “book”, I don’t mean that in the traditional paper and ink way, but rather in the Kindle electronic download way.

Paper and ink is so yesterday.

I’ve finished the female detective books and started on the male FBI agent.

Crawled into bed early last night, feeling pretty tired, but also chuffed with myself that we had found a nice spot with no cost, and we had a lovely big space upwind of the toilet block.

I’d had a shower and crawled into bed, and got comfy with Tom. Well, with his book. Book 1 in the series of 3 books.

90% of the book was showing as complete, so I should get it finished easily last night.

Right, but also wrong. I got it finished in about 9 minutes … and it was only about 7.30pm.

But that’s not a problem. I just need to download the next one in the series off Amazon Unlimited. Except … downloading needs network connection, and we had no mobile coverage at Bang Bang.

Bugger.

One of the things that we love doing when we travel is to stop in the small townships and poke around their Op Shops to see what stuff we can find. MBW normally tackles the kitchen section (… or toys, or clothes, or …) while I look at the books to see what I can find.

You know what? This trip through the NT has found us going through so few little townships that we have virtually had no Op Shops to look in.

No Op Shops means no books bought … so I had no backup plan for my next book.

Fortunately MBW had my back once again, and now I am reading something else by a different author again, about a female FBI agent who is a profiler.

Not that any of that has any relevance on todays blog, but I thought you may be interested.

Or not.

One of the strange things about the wind is that while you can be “upwind” of something one moment, if the wind changes you can suddenly find yourself “downwind”.

So when I woke this morning, there was an unmistakeable .. sniff, sniff … smell in the air that was … unpleasant. The wind had shifted and we were suddenly downwind of the toilet block.

Needless to say we made a pretty hasty exit this morning. We had a quick coldpress coffee and we were on the road post haste.

Before that smell really embedded itself in our clothing and hair.

We had a relatively short run to Normanton and we decided that we would stop and have breakfast there.

The roads were good. No, that’s not true. The roads were GREAT.

Flat, smooth, wide, fast. It was hard keeping Elsie below 110km/h which was the posted speed limit. Only about an hour into Normanton, and we’d be there in no time.

And then there were roadworks. And then there were people mowing along the side of the road.

There were narrow bridges with the most beautiful water flowing through them. Under them. You know what I mean.

And then we got a sign that said “single lane road for the next 20km”. So that’s OK so long as there is no oncoming traffic.

Like the trucks towing horse floats. Or the cars. There was a police car.

So there was a lot of slowing down, and pulling off to the side of the road to allow another vehicle to pass.

But we got there safely.

Normanton. Home of Krys the crocodile.

Seriously, those roads are the widest roads that I hav ever seen. In Brisbane, they could probably fit 2 or 3 houses side-by-side across those streets.

And pubs! How many pubs does a town of 1500 people need? And not an Op Shop in sight.

We stopped for breakfast, checked emails and made a few phone calls.

As my mate Jack Reacher says, “Make your phone calls and check your email when you have 5G”. He is a wise man.

That done, I reached out to one of my colleagues from (where I used to) work to find out our chances of getting onto the Queensland Rail Gulflander – one of the tourist train services between Normanton and Croydon.

And it’s looking like we may be able to do that on Wednesday. Woohoo!

Karumba – home for the next 3 nights – was only about another 75km or 50 minutes, and we were keen to get here, get set up, do some washing, and kick back for a while.

We were tired.

That road from Normanton to Karumba is probably one of the best roads that I have driven on in a long time. Honestly, you could probably land a 747 on that thing, it was so long and straight, and flat.

We got into Karumba around 11.30am, found our site, and set up camp. A beautiful spot with nice shady trees and only $39/night.

We did some administration (code for washing, emails, blogs that had been written but not posted due to the lack of mobile reception, etc) then had a quick bite of lunch and went out for a looky-see.

And we found the water.

Beautiful. I could live here.

Some groceries, fuel and a look around to orient ourselves, and we were back at Percy around 3.00pm and settled in for a quiet afternoon.

Some of the things that we want to see in the next few days require just a little bit of management – confirming dates, checking distances, confirming availability … all that sort of stuff – so we spent the rest of the afternoon doing that.

MBW’s world-famous chicken enchiladas for dinner out in the cool evening watching the sun go down.

And while I’m sure that you are getting sick of sunset photos, here are some more.

That’s about it for the day. It was a good day – not too much driving, but seeing some things that we haven’t been before. Normanton (population 1500) is very pretty, and Karumba (population 500ish) has a really casual, beachy feeling to it.

We are really looking forward to a couple of days of rest, and (hopefully) a trip on the Gulflander down to Croyden, then the bus back again.

And it looks like we have been able to plan and lock in things for the next week or so, so that is a load off our minds.

Once we leave Cairns, we will probably think about making a run for home, so it is likely that we will be back in Brisbane late June.

If you are talking to Zach, please let him know that he will need to put the diswasher on soon, mow the lawn and clean the pool.

Ciao

#Retirement2024

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