Well, the plan was to go to the Boulia Camel Races, cross the desert and go
to some outback places, and end up in Louth for their annual picnic races.

You know what they say about the best laid plans.....

We left home and drove out through Charleville, Windorah and on to
Diamantina National Park where we had plans to meet another couple
travelling with us there. That went OK. We were camped at Hunters Gorge and our friends met us the day we arrived also. It was a lovely place to camp, on a waterhole, lots and lots of corellas, pelicans, brolgas and other
birds. We heard dingos howling at night but did not actually see them. Shame as they are apparently quite unique there being almost white rather than yellow. We caught some huge yellowbelly in the waterhole...2-3kg each and I think we had about 7 of them. We went for some great walks along the waterhole and up onto the escarpment behind.
We were leaving Friday morning to drive the 180 odd Km into Boulia and were all packed up ready to go (except the tents which are the last things to come down and put away thank goodness) when it started to rain. We retreated to the tents. It rained hard, it thundered, there was lightning...thats Ok we thought its just a storm, but no, the rain continued all day so we spent 10hrs sitting in our little tents with no other gear out. Luckily a couple of times during the day the rain stopped briefly so we could rush out to the car and get some things like food and drink, books to read etc. The wind howled and we thought the tents would blow away. They were tied to trees, to the vehicles, to anything we could tie them to. The rain stopped just before dark and we dragged gear out again to sleep and cook with and settled for the night. We were told later there had been 2 inches of rain.
Some of you will know what these outbback places are like after rain. MUD!!
It was ankle deep. You got bogged in it just walking. The idea was don't
move too much. The next day was dry but the mud was still ankle deep and we couldn't get chairs and tables out or anything as they would just get too
muddy and wet. So we spent the whole day standing up...trying not to walk too far. The mud was so heavy and thick on the boots you couldn't even tell which boot went on which foot and I managed to walk across to the toilet with my boots on the wrong feet before I figured out why they felt strange.
We did manage to get a BBQ out and had fish fillets on the BBQ with potatoes in the coals...ate standing up of course.
The next day it was dry and sunny again so we thought maybe we could pack up and give it a go to drive out. The ground was firming up, no ankle deep mud anymore, so we set of and got the Landie bogged just 100m from where we were camped!! This is the new Landie...3 weeks old and pristinely clean. We dug the mud from around the tyres but Numpty didn't want to put his muddy boots in the new car, so he sat on the seat and lowered his boots onto shovels that we held out over the boghole, and drove out in his socks!! Wish we could have got a pic of that little effort, apparently the onlookers were in stitches!! We got about 3km from camp and came to a rather dicey looking creek crossing so radioed ahead to the Ranger Station and they told us to stay put and they would come and get us. They did. Us and the 4 other vehicles at Hunters Gorge with us. In convoy thet took us back to the Ranger Station. Only 10km but it took us 1 1/2 hours to get there as on the way there were 4 boggings. The rangers then checked the roads out of the park and only one was fit to drive on ( still, lots of bogholes and soft patches) but they escorted us to the park border and we were on our way. Mind you, headed in a totally different direction to what we wanted. It was late afternoon by then so we drove on to the next nearest campsite at Old Cork arriving just on dark. We were able to drive through to Boulia the next day, Monday, and the races were over and done with. Apparently attendence was down due to many folk getting stuck in various places in the mud.
We *did* meet our next lot of travelling companions there as planned tho
even tho 3 days late!!



Other campers on the trek out got bogged



Numpty rescueing Ranger Barbara from the bog :-)

Numpty's Missus