Day 5 - to Tennant Creek (or somewhere near it anyway)

We've reached Northern Territory! Finally! At last! I've never been here before, so it's exciting. We crossed the border a little before lunch.

We left Nanny and Pa at Mt Isa today. :( it was so sad. I've really enjoyed having them so close all the time.

We went and saw the open cut mine last night, before it got dark. I took heaps of photos with Pa's camera. I learnt that it doesn't like being moved very much, but if you keep it still, it takes amazing photos.

Guess what I made for dessert last night? Packet mix lemon cheesecake! We had it in the cupboard at home in Brisbane, so Mum brought it with us. It doesn't need any cooking, so all I did was line an ice cream container with alfoil and make it in there! It was a huge success.

Because Nanny and Pa lived in t Isa the first few years of their marriage, we went to see the house that Pa built. He was really smart, and built it on the upwind side of town, so one of the lead oxide smokey stuff from the mines would blow into the house and give them all lead poisoning. It was a pity that no-one was home, so we couldn't have a look inside, but can you believe what we saw!? The electrical pole that Pa put up 50 years ago! It's still there and in use! I found that amazing.

One thing my grandparents couldn't believe was how green it all was. All day yesterday Nanny and Pa were saying how weird it was that there were trees everywhere! When they lived here, there was nothing except a few scrub trees and dead grass…

Pa was talking to a few randoms who lived in Mt Isa when he lived there, and they said the mines had been bought up by someone else, and these new people weren't interested in putting money back into the town. They're hiring people from New Zealand who'll work for less, flying them to the Isa for several weeks, and then flying them back.

They're not even using the trains anymore - they're using trucks instead - so the station's going out of business. A bit sad really.

Haha. Mum just yelled out 'hamburgers!' again. :)

Dini's turning into a real book-chomper. Already she's finished off two novel-sized Enid Blyton books while we've been away, and she's just starting another! She's getting fast.

Oh, and in Gobblet yesterday, she actually beat me! She was so excited she didn't stop talking about it for about an hour. It was hilarious.

There were a whole lot of pigeons hanging round our campsite at Mt Isa as well. Both mornings, a whole group of about 10 of them would fly/waddle down to our place, peck around a few minutes, then disappear.  They make a funny sound like a ping pong ball bouncing really fast up and down between a paddle and the ping pong table. :)

Talking about funny sounds, we have a whole pile of foam puzzle pieces that fit together to make a nice floor in front of our caravan. But the thing is, they're full of holes about the size of a twenty cent piece, and whenever you walk over them in thongs or other shoes with a smooth flat bottom, they make a popping sound! They suction on loosely, and make a funny noise when you pull them off! It's hilarious, sitting in the caravan and hearing random popping sounds every now and then.

Jo, Dom and Oskar made a movie yesterday about shooting with nerf guns. It was very good, except Jo can't spell oskar's name right, and the credits took as long as the movie itself! But it's very clever - the climax is sloowwweeeed right down. Dad thought Jo had added sound effects for the nerf gun shots, but that's the actual noise they make!

And, can you believe what we went past today? We were on Rank-en Road (boy, does it stink… :) ), and we actually went past a 13 km/h speet sign! Wow! I think that's the fastest legal speed I've ever seen in Australia. But, unfortunately, our car is too loaded to go any faster than about 90km/h. (Dad said he's averaging about 85km/h because he wants to conserve fuel. :) )

Along the way, we've seen hundreds of huge, tall ants nests (I think they're termites). Every now and then you get a huge clump of them for kilometers at a time. We stopped today at one of them that was especially huge - about 2m across, 1.5-2m high!!). We took photos of us at them.

We couldn't believe how spikey the grass was though, when we were getting the photos. The grass around here is stiff and thick and round, not nice and soft like in Brisbane. On the end of each is a stiff spike, so when you walk past a clump, it really hurts! It feels like thousands of needles being jabbed into you over and over. It's painful, and my legs were still itching an hour after we took the photos! Ouch!

We stopped at the Barkly Homestead for a fillup on the way. Dad looked on the internet (his trusty iPhone again!) and found out that there's no gas (LPG, which is what our Land Cruiser runs on) between Camooweal (I think that's the right spelling!) and Elliot. But, surprise! There was one at the Barkly Homestead. Dad was pretty excited. :)

Day 4 - in Mt Isa: continued

We went and saw the house that Pa built today - it was a pity that the people weren't there and we couldn't really see it. But Dad saw Pa's electrical pole - it's till there after 50 years! Wow!

Dini and I played Gobblet about twenty times today - a fun strategy game that mum got for her 40th from my aunty. I beat Dini every time except one, and I wasn't really concentrating that time… :) haha. Just kidding. Sometimes an incoming thrashing is hard to forsee for an eight-year-old.

Dini and I also mixed up a packet mix lemon cheesecake today. It's in the fridge now, waiting for its early demise at about 6:30 tonight. :)

There's a pool here as well - Dini and I keep on going to check the temp, but it's always MUCH too cold. Last time we went, the sprinklers were on (see, I told you the Mt Isa people like their sprinklers!), and we both ran through the sprinklers and got kinda wet. But because it's pretty warm today, it was nice and refreshing. :)

Mum is cooking the most DELICIOUs dinners. Last night was a sort of spaghetti bolognaise with broccoli and one of the million and one packets of pasta she bought before we left. She said they were cheap - a few dollars for two packets - so off she goes and buys TEN!!! :)

Caravan Parks

Im keeping a record of the caravan parks we stayed in, and a little about them. Check out the page on the left side of my blog, under 'more pages'. :)

Day 4 - In Mt Isa

So, we're where Nanny and Pa spent 7 or 8 years! They hardly recognise a thing. They said when they lived here, NOTHING was green, in September (which is now), it was 35 degrees, and it was so hot, you had trouble breathing.
Well, now it's COMPLETELY different! Everyone has sprinklers everywhere, the whole place is as green as an unripe mango, and instead of 35 degrees, it's 25 degrees, a nice change to the almost (but not quite) sub zero temps we've had since the start of our trip!
Dad got a query as to the seating arrangements in our puny little car... :)
Well, except for yesterday, everyone's sat the same place: The three oldest boys in the back, Dini, Cooper and I in the middle, with Dini in the very middle, Dad driving (awesome), and mum playing cook/waitress, janitor, DJ, navigator, and all the million and one other things required of the person in the passenger seat!
Yesterday, dad migrated to the backseat (which he calls the party seat!), mum started driving (very well, I might add), joseph became first mate in place of mum (much to his excitement, at least until he realised all the responsibilities tied to the seat of honour!!!), and Dini and I swapped seats, so I was now in the very centre of the car. I think that particular swap we realised to be for the better.
Dad's called our little wireless network BRT. Don't even ask. :)
Today is a rest day for us (phew!). After spending 8-10 hours in the car with seven other people three days straight (and some - namely dad - haven't even changed clothes for that amount of time!), this really is a relief!
Mum as looking on the map yesterday, and guess what she saw!!! Farmhouses are marked on our camping refedex as little black squares, and one of the little black squares in the area is called our family's surname!!! Pity it's too far away to reach. :(
I've changed all the settings in my browser so NO pictures show up until I click on them. Dad was impressed with my download saving abilities. :) Oh, and dad and mum got a new camera, so I get to use theirs. And it's pretty good! :)
We couldn't believe yesterday how the landscape changed from Longreach to Mt Isa - it went from dry, brown, dead flat, scrubby plains, to very hilly, green, landscape - with trees!

Day 3 - To Mt Isa

We got a huge fright last night.

We watched Rango (a gr8 movie) in the car on my laptop yesterday. Dad has an FM transmitter that plays sounds through the car speakers (i.e. if we have something on the phone, we can make it louder with the transmitter).

We tried syncing two laptops with the movie, and playing the sound through the speakers, but mine kept stopping, so they'd get out of sync.

In the end, we all watched  the same screen which I had to have perched on my knees. It was kind of uncomfortable…

Anyway, we still hadn't finished it after the trip, so after dinner, we watched some more on mum's bed, which, if you don't know, is one of the expanding double beds - the one that sticks out the back of the caravan.

Dad, curious guy that he is, came to watch too, so all seven of us were on the bed. Then Mum came too. That was our mistake.

Suddenly, the whole place seemed to fall. It must've been funny from the outside, but inside, we got a huge fright.

The caravan had tipped up! All one and a half tonnes of it! Perched on two wheels and a bumper bar!!!!! AAARRRGHHHH!

Boy, the adrenaline that rushed through me! Mum rushed up the other end before our end hit the ground, and the caravan thunked back down. Now we're all really cautious about all being up one end… :)

The roads are rougher than in Brisbane, especially after we've been used to the Tarago for eight years. The 4WD is a rougher ride. Sometimes it gets so your fingers hit two keys instead of one on the laptop, and your underside beats a tattoo on the seat. :) And writing by hand is completely out of the question!

Nanny and Pa stayed in a unit again. Every time they (or dad) cooked toast in there, the fire alarm went off. I, of course, succeeded in cooking six pieces without a sound from the alarm, but when I was back in the caravan, we heard the alarm go off again, and all thought, 'Yep, they're cooking toast again!'

When we were packing up the caravan today, we couldn't get mum and dad's bed to fold up. We got the hugest fright, we were so worried that we'd bent it last night. Thankfully, we realised the caravan never rested on the actual expanding part, only on the bumper bar. Phew!

It's amazing how flat Longreach and the surrounding area is. You can see for miles, and the horizon is what seems like a thousand kilometers away. Mum said when the wet season comes, Longreach is stranded for weeks, or even months. The water doesn't even have to be deep - it just goes for so long that the people can't actually get anywhere.

The cool thing about Longreach is that all (and I mean ALL) its streets are named after birds. There's Ibis st, Kingfisher st, Owl st, and so on. Dom's favourite is Bus-tard. No surprise there.

We've FINALLY got the internet working. Mum's  got the internet laptop at the moment, so I'm writing this on my laptop. Mum, uneducated in basic technology as she is, read 0B to be oh bee, when it actually is zero bytes. :) very funny.

Day 2 - To Longreach

It was ice cold this morning -  0°C! We talked to some people who were staying in a tent, and they said they had ice on the inside, so it got below freezing in the night. It was so cold that Dom warmed his hands in his breakfast milk, and mum warmed her hands in the fridge (I'm not even joking - Dom did actually have his fingers in the milk, and it was colder outside than in the fridge!).

We left at 8:30 this morning, and it's now 9:15, and So far today we've seen two live emus, a circling hawk, one live wallaby, about twenty dead kangaroos, and hundreds of feasting crows. Pa said he's never seen so much roadkill. We just saw a kangaroo, and dad said we should call it Potential Roadkill.

Dom is out official spotter - we'll be driving along and he'll yell 'ROADKILL!' He says he can see it from a mile away, because of the red spots covered in birds. Cooper's now picked up a new word - woad kill! He says it every two or three seconds. It's going to drive us insane before long… I don't think he even knows what it is. :) We tried telling him it's actually roadkill, but all he did was change to wot-kill…

He's actually started speaking a lot. Last night he was climbing walls, shouting the place down, and it was 9:00 in the evening! That's when we began to regret letting him sleep in the car..

We passed an emu farm yesterday - there were masses of emus everywhere.

I've been getting rather serious backside-cramps. I'm hurting down there in places I never thought possible. 8 hours in a car really does it to you…

It's pretty exciting - we're going places I've never been before! Soon we'll be in Northern Territory - more like Unknown Territory for me! We've just stopped at a BP on the Warrego Highway in Morvan, and there's three emus plodding around! Very impressive. But the place stinks - bad - from all the cattle trucks around. It's rather sad - all these cute cows with their own personalities are going to be killed. :(

We've started moving into red-dirt territory… I've heard that red dirt equals red caravan… !!!

...

I would be writing in my journal right now, except the road is as bumpy as a ginormous rocky road. We just stopped for what seemed like hours waiting to go through roadworks for the second time in as many days. (Why do I always seem to write in roadworks???)

Mum counted how many roadkill we passed in half an hour. I think she counted over thirty! (I am talking a lot about roadkill, but then, there's a lot around here!)

It's all starting to look pretty 'Aussie', which is something that I don't think I've seen before now!! For example, there's red dirt, one long, lonely road, low bush and brown scrub, wide, wide blue sky, dust exploding from every car's rear end, and the horizon looking like jelly as he heat rises off the road. It's a novel experience!!

In fact, the whole thing looks rather like what my blog background looks like! Before I picked that pic, I had a smooth, blue sea (I tried to find something Aussie), but I'm glad I picked that one! Much more suitable. :)

Aaarrggh!!! We've reached another roadworks!!!!! Dad's learnt now that he's better off turning off the whole engine, we always wait so long.

We also can't believe how many road trains there are on this road. We've passed so many! One even had four carriages, though most have about three.

Last night we were making up and telling each other really, really (and I mean really!) lame jokes, like when do you have a BBQ? (Friday) and when did dad have a baby? (Sunday), and when do you put something on your feet? (Tuesday (shoes-day), and when do you get married? (Wednesday) and when do you make lemonade? (Thursday) (I think that was the best, made up by mum (no surprise there)). I also mentioned the lamest of all lame jokes, courtesy of Uncle Tim -(also no surprise there) When you're at the pool, you're at the stadium - your at sunk-orb! (Suncorp). Gotta admit, that tops the lot! The worst of the worst!

Oh, and to put us all at ease, mum just mentioned that at this time of year, there might be snakes. Wish us luck!!! (Aaarghhh!)

Day 1 - to Mitchell

We left Brisbane today! I won't be there for four weeks, and the rest of my family won't be there again for four months!!! Wow! We'll be travelling the first week with dad's parents - up to Mt Isa.

We left about 7:30 (1 1/2 hours after the planned 6:00 start!) Our awesome cousins saw us off. My littlest brother was asleep until about 7:15, and mum joked that we’d better not forget him! He was wrapped up in his bed blanket for the first few hours of the trip!

Our first stop was at Toowoomba, which was freezing cold - 6.8 degrees, 2.4 with the chill factor. And to think that it's 13 degrees in Brisbane! Mum got out the first time up there, and was back in the car within two seconds. Anyone would think we’d just landed in Greenland, the way we were dressed (okay, maybe not quite so bad!).

There’s some flower festival in Toowoomba at the moment, so there’s masses of flowers everywhere. It’s really amazing, but we didn’t hang around long – we were quite frozen after a few minutes!

We ate muesli and yoghurt for breakfast (at 9:3 in the morning!), and lost Nanny and Pa. While we were walking around the gardens, we met a lady walking a poodle (with red dyed ears) in a pram, and a puppy on a leash.

The first thing I thought was. ‘how do you walk a poodle in a pram?’

And the second thing I thought, after the lady said the puppy was a terrier cross shitzu, was ‘imagine if he was a bulldog cross shitzu!’

We also saw in Toowoomba what I think is the weirdest name for a school – the Holy Name School. I’ve seen an Our Lady Of The Rosary, and an Our Lady Of The Sacred Heart school, but not a Holy Name school!

Our land cruiser doesn't have a CD player, which makes sense, considering that it's 17 years old - older than me! - but it does have a tape player. So now we have all our old tapes out. It's hilarious how many of the songs I remember - I must have listened to then a LOT when I was little!!!

We drove through Dalby, which I, being uneducated in geography, and educated in technology, thought to be spelt ‘Dolby’…

Our next stop was in Chinchilla. We ate lunch and lost Nanny and Pa again. There was a pioneer cemetery across the road from where we stopped. The cemetery was divided into Methodist, Catholic, Presbyterian, and Anglican religion sections. All the graves were facing the same way: east. It was really sad that some of the people who died were only eighteen fourteen, or even one years old. There were signs explaining what different crosses, flowers, etc meant on a grave – for example, a broken column means a life cut short, and a celtic cross (cross with a circle) means eternity.

We had lunch at a playground that was about two sizes too small for me. There was a little boat seesaw that Dini, Dominic, Oskar and I crammed into (my knees made me feel like a grasshopper), except with all of us on it it ended up feeling more like a pendulum on steroids than a seesaw… Dini fell off, and when my back end slid off, they kept swinging, so I’ve got a few bruises.

Right now, we’re going through a massively long roadworks section. We had to wait so long to go through, dad ended up turning off the engine! It goes for several kilometres. It’s really funny, because dad has a radio, and when he tuned in, we could hear everything the workers were saying!

Oh, and by the way, we’ve been devouring the anzac cookies – thanks Joy! – and the muffins are up for tonight’s dessert! (thanks the Boyless!!!)

We can’t believe how hard it is to get air for the tyres on the way. Good grief! You’d think there was a pipe shortage! We’ve stopped at at least five different petrol stations and none of them have air!!

Dom was learning about the Noble Gases the other day, and mum said, ‘that’s us!’ Especially since there’s eight of them and eight of us. It doesn’t help that our car runs on gas too…

new season, new look!

I figured since we're leaving on a trip around australia in about three days, and since spring has started, it was time for a blog makeover. :)
And, it's got a bit of an aussie theme too!!!
P.S. It took me about an hour to work it all out!!!

For more technical info...

If you want to know the technicals about our trip (or just want to hear another point of view), check out my dad's blog:
http://aroundozwith6kids.blogspot.com/
 - for the actual link (sorry the above adress wont show up as a link) see the 'Other interesting sites' toolbar on the left of my blog.
Mum also hopes to start a blog, so I'll let you know about that one soon too. :)

I can't believe it's less than seven days until we leave on our trip around asutralia!!!!
Because we couldn't work out my grade 11 schoolwork around the trip, I'll fly home after 4 weeks and stay with my wonderfully awesome grandparents for 7 weeks (and do school :( )
Then, I'll fly back to perth and we'll be away another 2 months.
It's exciting, but I have to study for 4 maths exams and a german speaking test before we leave...
Tragic.