Honeymoon of Awesomeness Day 10

After a restless night with possibly only 10 minutes sleep we were ready to get on the road early. Destination Burketown... I think... It was still dark but some light from the roadhouse shone down the paddock to where we were. I plugged in my fluro camp tube so we had some extra light to work with. Dusty was still sleeping on our tarp, bless his cute little soul!! We had packed up really quickly today as we didn't need to unpeg the tent or anything. We said goodbye to Dusty (and I regret not getting a photo with him) and waved goodbye to the hardest place to pitch a tent in QLD. 

Photo courtesy of Phil Rettke Photography.

On the way out we noticed one guy with a tent had actually stolen the rocks out of the garden to tie his guy ropes to... Smart bugger :) Goodbye Burke and Wills Roadhouse!! As we drove out the driveway, and not having a solid plan, we decided on the spot to give Burketown a miss and head straight to Normanton, for some reason!! Cool!! We drove for around an hour until it neared sunrise. There was another cloudbank hanging around the Eastern horizon and soon proved sunrise was not going to be great. I took a few shots around these pretty cool termite mounds anyway.

This stretch of the road after the termite mounds proved to be very boring. The bush was around 3m high and we were unable to see anything in any direction until we reached Normanton. We were that bored we even introduced 2 new friends to our roadtrip. My friend Navi...

And Christine really was missing Scally...

Just out of Normanton we pulled over as we were starving, we had some cereal and juice in a nice little spot on the side of the road. Just as we left our spot 2 massive pigs scurried across the road, they were huge and we only just missed them!! Our first stop in Normanton was the Railway Station and Museum. This place was great and stored so many interesting objects and stories. Well worth the visit and to top it off it was free!!

Photo courtesy of Phil Rettke Photography.

We wandered around here for over an hour, and on our way out we come across 2 of the famous residents from here, Gregory and Mrs Peck! This is Gregory!!

Photo courtesy of Phil Rettke Photography.

The next stop on the way to the info centre was the life size replica of Krys, the 8.63m crocodile killed on the Norman River in July 1957 by Krys Pawlowski. He didn't look that big!

Photo courtesy of Phil Rettke Photography.

Or did he, I am 6'2" and pretty solid..... :O Imagine coming across him, he could swallow you whole!!

Photo courtesy of Phil Rettke Photography.

We then hit the info centre, we had a good look around and the lady told us the best place to stay, as the Normanton Rodeo was on that weekend, was at Karumba about 70km away. This was perfect for us..  We got diesel at $1.62/L and we were then ready to go. Just around the corner as we passed the local bakery we decided a pie would probably go down well. This was a beef, cheese and bacon with special smiley sauce!! Yumm!!

On the Eastern side of Normanton there is a boat ramp and a wetland, this was where we saw our first Achtung sign for the trip, which is German for Attention and basically means, keep the hell out of the water or you will be eaten by a giant crocodile!!

The drive to Karumba was great, we had so much fun... We slowed down and stopped as we passed tidal streams and water trying to spot any sign of crocs. We did pass many dams that were covered in pelicans on the way also. By time we got there Christine was sick of my "Hi Karumba" jokes. Our next mission was to find somewhere to stay. We checked all 3 caravan parks only to find out they were completely packed. Everyone from those cold states obviously knew exactly where to go!! Since we were on our honeymoon we decided to stay at a motel for the night. We checked in at "End of the Road Motel" it was pretty nice. We tossed up if we wanted one or two nights here but in the end we decided one would be enough as it was around midday and town wasn't too big. We went for a walk on the beach after this which was lovely. We collected some shells from the beach here and desperately wanted to see a croc. Only a few days earlier someone's dog got taken from the very same beach. It was also on this walk Christine finally thought it was a nice thing to point out that my shirt had been on inside out all day... I was wondering why everyone kept looking at me funny all day! We wanted to do a sunset cruise on the Norman River and the Gulf, but none of the tour operators where interested in us which was a big let down. Instead we made the most of the mangroves near the motel. The beauty of this was the motel also had a bar and restaurant that backed onto the beach. About the only photographic spot we had found all day. We watched sunset while having a drink and waiting on dinner. It was great!!

Photo courtesy of Phil Rettke Photography.

After a great feed and all the colour had faded from the sky we walked the 25 metres back to our place where we had a chance to check some emails and see what the outside world was doing - you know all that stuff you don’t really want to do when on holidays. The weather had been perfect the whole time so one thing we should have done was check what the weather had in store for us over the next few days. I think this was the first place to have wi-fi since Maccas at Emerald. We still hadn't seen a croc yet!! Goodnight.

We did 308km since we left the Burke and Wills Roadhouse giving us a total of 4266km driving so far.