Day 48 - Mount Isa (Again!)

As you can see by the photo, we have made it back to Queensland.  We had a huge day driving from Tennant Creek to Mt Isa (over 600kms) but had the most amazing stroke of fortune on the Barkly Highway, just before Barkly Homestead.  We ran into our friends who we had left on the Tanami Track 5 days ago.  Quite amazing as neither of us had been planning to head to Mt Isa and we had each been wondering what had happened to the other as we hadn't exchanged phone numbers or email addresses.  5 minutes either way and we would have missed them as we were stopping at Barkly Homestead for coffee and they were staying on the highway.  So we both pulled into the Homestead and were able to trade stories of what had happened.  Seems they had even worse conditions on their return to Halls Creek than we did on our way to Rabbit Flat.  Seems all the roads in the Kimberley were impassable for a couple of days and the area has had its wettest July on record (up to 10th July).  They are camped with us here in Mt Isa and we have taken the opportunity to take both the car and trailer to the local car wash and hit them both with the high pressure water gun.  Neither is perfect, but do look a whole lot better.    We did have an interesting trip to the museum this afternoon and to the underground hospital.  Apparently after Darwin was bombed during WW2, the authorities thought that Mt Isa might be the next target so they decided to build a hospital underground both for the use of their current hospital patients and also for casualties from any attack that might occur.  Fortunately it was never used, although they say that the nurses use to sleep there when they were off duty as it was cool.  It then was forgotten until about 10 years ago and it has been repaired and furnished exactly as per the photos that were taken at the time of building.  There is even a ladder for escape through the ventilation shaft in case the main entrance was bombed.  It was built by the Mt Isa Mine staff in exactly the same way as the mine is built and has timber framing to hold up the ceilings etc.  They have collected lots of very old medical gear which is on display - makes one flinch to think that some of the gadgets would have been used on people.  

Tomorrow we head for Winton and plan to stay there in the national park for a couple of days and do a side trip to Lark Quarry to check out the dinosaur stampede footprints.  It's a good feeling to be back in our home state even though we still have another 2000 kms to go.