28th Sept to 5th October 2020
We left Darwin on 28th September and started heading south. First night we made our way to Daly Water, which is approximately 500km from Darwin. We stayed at the Hi Way Inn Daly which was a nice place to stay on the Stuart Highway. Nice green grass and shady trees made the hot day more bearable as it was about 37 degrees when we arrived. We were up and gone by 7am the next morning to try and make it as far as we could before the heat set in again. Our plan was to stay at Barkley Homestead but as it was only about 1pm when we arrived here we decided to just fuel up and keep going. We crossed the Queensland border around 3pm with no really hold up as the police doing border control only required our drivers licence and our border passes that we had filled out on line. We stayed the night about 20km across the border at a small town called Camooweal.
The next day we travelled to Mount Isa where we ended up spending three nights and not really seeing anything as Jeff had a parting gift from the NT (food poisoning !!!). After three days in Mount Isa we then drove to Richmond (approx 450km) where we spent the night in a terrific little caravan – Lakeview Caravan Park which had a beautiful view over a lake. Richmond is part of the dinosaur trail and is home to the Kronosaurus Korner which is home to Penny the Plesiosaur there most famous find in the area. This is a fantastic place to see many different sorts of dinosaurs/fossils that have been found in area. We spent a few hours here. The rest of the dinosaur trail we will come back and see later this year or next year.
Townsville was our next stop for a few nights. We are staying at the Discovery Park Townsville which is a great place to base ourselves for a few days. We have explored the waterfront precinct which gives you an amazing view over to Magnetic Island. Then we went up to Castle Hill Lookout which gives you the most amazing 369 degree views of Townsville. Definitely a place that we will come back and explore more.
Next stop Mission Beach for a few weeks….
