Gismo Queen and her King

What a peaceful night at our unique campsite on the banks of Bloods Creek. So nice that I woke feeling much better and we were ready to go by 9:30am. Because of the way we were parked, I turned out onto the Track first and hadn't got very far when I had to stop due to dropped firewood on the road!

It wasn't long before our first water crossing. It turned out that they came thick and fast after that, usually very muddy but with good solid base beneath all the water. For a desert track, it was amazing how many water crossings there were! We got held up at some road works and so had only covered 50km or so when it was time to stop for morning tea. This track, unlike other outback roads we have done, has very few places on the side of the road to stop at. Admittedly, everything is pretty wet at the moment so pulling off the main road is tricky but it took us several more kilometres before we came to the roadworks depot at a bore - which therefore had a very good entrance and lots of room to turn around in! - before we could have morning tea. Another 50 kilometres up the road - with plenty more water crossings, corrugations and even some dust (which seems incongruous given all the water - especially when the water is is laying in lakes either side of the road), we stopped for lunch at the wreck of an old Ford customline ute. With a sand dune in front of us - although the vans were parked on stony gibber plains - the scenery was starting to change. It was less than a 100 kilometres to Birdsville!

The road get better from then on, and we even got up to 70km/hr is a few sections so the afternoon passed pretty quickly. We crossed the border into Queensland and therefore lost half an hour but arrived in Birdsville just after 4pm. We came in past the famous racecourse and as we crossed the Diamantina river, we started to see all the caravans free camped on either side of the road. It got thicker the closer to town we got!

Our first stop was the roadhouse for fuel, then as we have arrived a day early, we thought we'd try and swap our paid for night in the caravan park from tomorrow night to tonight. No worries, so we got in. Nowehere near as nice as our campsites from the past few nights but we have water and have been able to do a few loads of washing - very necessary after a week of mud! Mind you, many other people had the same plan so there were queues for the washers and dryers.

We are back in service but with thousands of people trying to get data, it is pretty slow. Hopefully we will get this up in the next day or so. Maybe not with photos though.