Threeways Roadhouse, NT to Mount Isa, QLD

​It's about 640kms from the Threeways Roadhouse to Mount Isa along the Barkly Highway and, we chose to smash it out in a day as Shovel had to start the ball rolling so to speak on his new job and I needed to find work. Honestly this stretch of road I believe was the hardest to drive in all of our travels around Australia and by this, I mean the oppressive remoteness… The terrain is flat, there are few if any trees and the view out of the car window is desolation, a dusty haze, yet despite the similarities to the Nullarbor Plain, the isolation hits different. On the Nullarbor (Eyre Highway) the trials and tribulations of life simply put, stop, and you relax into the journey feeling disconnected from time, it’s joyous, whimsical in fact. The Barkly Highway however, is foreboding and endless, devoid of landmarks, the sun’s rays intense through the car windscreen, there is no retreat. Despite the 130km speed limit we were towing Florence and were therefore restricted to 80kms, yes, feel our pain, the slow pace contributing to our feeling the straight flat stretch of tarmac would never end. But, it did end and we rolled into the Lake Moondarra Caravan Park later that day ready to begin our next chapter.      

​We were headed back to Mount Isa just over a year had passed since we’d left and to be honest I was feeling pumped, admittedly I’d missed the “quirk” of the remote desert outback boom town, and in my elation was throwing around wild predictions that I could live there for fifteen years… That was definitely not a typo I did actual believe we could survive in Mount Isa in outback Queensland, 900 odd kilometres from the coast for longer than a decade… and by we I actually mean me, Gumby. I had no concern the Shovel could do it, after all he was born and bred there, but the reality was and still is we are natural born drifters…