All roads lead to Rome, or in the case of the NT, almost all traffic funnels through Katherine, and so it was for us on our way to the ‘Walking With Spirits’ festival at Beswick the next night. On the way we checked out some WWII munition storage relics and some mining and rail heritage at Pine Creek. Sam now knows all about using stamper batteries to crush ore and steam engines to drive them – targeted education perhaps, but I reckon the world needs more engineers!

Pine Creek historic precinct.

Tonight’s CP, called North Bank, was a bit of a lottery, with Wikicamps reviewers being unusually inconsistent in their comments, words like ‘quirky’ and reviews such as ‘nice, but wouldn’t stay there again’ abounded. Basically it was cheap (for Katherine), close to town and populated mainly by permanents (caveat emptor). The itinerant floaters, i.e ‘us’, were invited to stay in the front yard of the owners, right next to a broken down tractor, broken down car, bits of vending machine, a shed full of junk, etc. You get the picture. Even James said ‘why are we staying in a junk yard?’.

North Bank CP – Katherine.

With Kris off to do the shopping – she has a weird aversion to shopping with children – I filled Betsy’s cavernous tanks before taking the boys to the local library to catch up on emails and whip out a few blog entries. The boys actually do use this time to read literature more diverse than our limited mobile collection, this is part of their education syllabus. We were now well stocked for our intended transit to Mt Isa.

(K – Strangely it has taken 6 months of doing every single grocery/supermarket shop in the company of two boys who are more interested in either fighting over who gets to “drive” the trolley or playing chases around the aisles all the while potentially causing bodily injury to the pottering grey nomads who fill the supermarkets during school hours for Julian to pick up on my aversion and actually do something else with the boys leaving me to shop in peace!  Surely my tendency to be yelling or hissing at the boys to be sensible might have been a clue.  I’m sure all the mothers of boys who are reading this will understand . . . add in the extra bonus of perhaps not being near shops again for another week so losing concentration and missing half the stuff on the list is not an option. It is the stuff of nightmares and not good for my blood pressure.)