Burke and Wills Roadhouse.

The trip down from Gregory has been quite easy. We are travelling at a maximum of 80 kph to ensure the piece of blue tarp stuck over the missing rear window stays in place. So far, so good. At least we have done the dusty, dirt, corrugation section from Boodjamulla back to Gregory.

The windows in the van did release and open enough to dust it all quite badly though. Big clean up yesterday afternoon. I shook quite a red cloud out of my bedding.

Now I heard someone thinking, "what happened to the back window?" Interesting story. It happened on the way from Gregory to Boodjamulla. We had done the 20k of sealed road at the Gregory end, then several bits of gravel and short sealed sections. As we mounted another nice bitumen section another vehicle went past.

All good so far. About 300m after we passed the vehicle there was a loud kaaa-booom. We had no idea what it was but I immediately abandoned my clever plan to go a little faster on the good road. Checking my rear view I now had a crystal clear view of part of the van behind I had not been able to see for days for the layers of dust on the rear window.

Mystery solved as to the what, but we still have no idea why. There were no stones, not even scattering under our own wheels. The other vehicle long past by then All I can speculate is a catastrophic failure of the glass panel. Such thing have been spoken of but usually it is believed to be a delayed break after stone damage.

We spent over half an hour clearing as much broken glass as we could and then wedging in a tarp to keep most of the dust our for the next 60 or so Kilometers we still had to go to Boodjamulla.

We have just had confirmation that a new rear window is waiting to be fitted when we get to Mt Isa on Friday. Until then we are hoping the duct tape hangs in.

Just a short distance south of the roadhouse we were lucky enough to see a brown Falcon perched in a tree.Read more