Road Trains & the Mining Town of Mt Isa

It’s a public holiday today in Queensland and with an early start, we drive down Charters Towers Main Street in search of food. Dead as a door nail, not a squeak to be heard, ghost town, zombie apocalypse until... aha, MCDONALDS.

Apart from petrol stations and we are over their food selection, the only place in town open seems to be Maccas. Breakfast to go it is then and we hit the road, destination Mt Isa.

DRIVE: Charters Towers to Mt Isa (769km).

It’s a long drive today which will take us 8 hours. We share the drive as usual with me holding the steering wheel and Jen’s foot on the gas peddle...

The speed limit is 110km/hr but there’s a 3 semi trailer length road train in front doing 80 and 2 cars behind it unwilling to overtake. So we are stuck for a while. This doesn’t stop two road trains on route to Mt Isa behind us blazing past everyone in the right hand lane. Their overtaking manoeuvre to pass vehicles was the length of a football pitch and they completed it after travelling about 5 football pitches but they can see the road is clear ahead for miles.

Finally, we reach a passing lane and we’re able to cruise on past the cars and the slow moving road train to continue our journey. On the long trip to Mt Isa, we had to pass and overtake about 10 road trains. The drivers usually signal the coast is clear by using their right indicator and we make sure we have a good scope of the horizon and we pass as quickly as we can.

We pass through Hughenden, Richmond, Julia Creek and Cloncurry with only Richmond barely having any sign of life.

After 363km we reach Richmond. It’s famous for dinosaur discoveries and has a museum with many fossils from the local area on display. I get caught by a Kronosaurus with teeth the size of bananas.

We forgot, it’s a public holiday so no cafes or bakeries open so we share a packet of caramel popcorn for lunch on the go.

Reaching Mt Isa at 4.30pm, we find a caravan park for the night..

CAMP: Discovery Park Mt Isa / 1 night

Starving, it’s life or death. They say man can survive without food for a good while but not water. Our tummy’s were saying otherwise so we head up to the Rodeo Bar & Grill, Mt Isa Hotel. We take a short detour on the way and drive up to the lookout at Mt Isa to see the signpost with the directions of all major city’s around the world. Melbourne is 2008km due south from here. London is 15,274km.

Beautiful rib eye steaks on the menu and the place was buzzing with every resident in town eating out tonight . Oh look, the National ten pin bowling championships are on in Mt Isa and they have all just arrived with their bright baggy bowling shirts and they pile into the restaurant. Good job we had our caveman instincts switch on to survival mode as were were practically first in the queue to place our order for steaks as the clock ticked one second past 6 o’clock.

We needed meat and protein and like cavemen & women do, we devoured our meal, went back to our cave and fell fast asleep.Read more