Introducing Cloncurry..and an Update...

Our spacious site...

Hi everyone, its Shane here thought I'd give this blog a go as Dimi is very unwell at the moment, so should be a quick one. Here we are at Cloncurry, this is our site at the Oasis caravan park. Plenty of space around us, the park is quite empty. We have been here for over a week now, still waiting for parts and prices for our vehicle. We have found out that the drive plate broke and had damaged the torque convertor which both have to be replaced. It may cost around $4000-$5000 possibly more if parts have to come from Melbourne, so all you praying people you know what to do, and its much appreciated. 

Cloncurry is a very small town in Northwest Qld, it is mostly a mining  and cattle town. There isn't a whole lot to do here but we make the most of it.

Fun game of skipbo...

Pool at the caravan park...

 

 

 

Library time...

church...

Serena getting bitten by a puppet...

We have had many card games with the girls and plenty of pool time and a walk to woolworths everyday is our highlight of the day. Haha.

My Beautiful wife and I making love heart shadows...

Anniversary dinner...

We were supposed to be in Alice Springs for our 13th wedding anniversary but we were stuck here in nowhere land, but we made the most of it.  It doesn't matter where we are in the world I'm just happy to have been married to this beautiful woman for 13 years. I made the love of my life one of her favourite meals, chicken and chorizo paella. She loved it. (points to me)

With all the unfortunate things that have happened and being out of our control, I am so proud of our girls who have handled this with calmness and strength and they have continued to turn to God and pray. 

Although there hasn't been a lot to do we have had plenty of time to hang out and relax and also spend a lot of time seeking the Lord. We are praying about our next step in this faith led journey of ours. We Know that God has a plan for us and we will continue to trust him in all that we do.
When hard times come, ( and they do come) its easy to just give up and throw in the towel, but this is when you have to continue and get up and fight.
If you are going through any sort of struggle right now, I want to encourage you to not give up, but hand all your burdens to Jesus. Psalm 55:22 says "cast your burden upon the Lord, and He will sustain you; He will never allow the righteous to be shaken". God LOVES you and wants to be there for you, all you need to do is cry out to Him.

Thanks and be blessed.
Shane

And then this Happened...

So we left Normanton at about 7:30am to drive to Cloncurry. We worked out it would be about a 382km drive, and it would take us 5 hours plus a half hour rest stop, so we'd get to Cloncurry about 1:00pm. We were a little too excited about the fact that Cloncurry had a Woolworths (the other 2 towns we stayed at didn't have any well stocked and well priced grocery stores), we wanted to buy some icy poles and a few other things, then have a little explore around the info centre and town before we get to our site, set up, get refreshed in the pool, eat some dinner, and hit the sack for a good nights sleep. We then would wake refreshed in the morning and head towards a free camp in Camooweal for one night which is just under 3 1/2 hours away from Cloncurry...So that was the plan!

Well as we all know not everything goes to plan and this day certainly did not...
This is our drive to Cloncurry...

244km to go...

Just under 3 ours into our drive we stopped at our first ever Roadhouse for a rest and refresh...Burke and Wills Roadhouse...

More outback, Red dirt Scenery...

And then this happened! We were driving along, doing well we thought. I looked down at the Nav man and seen that we had just 46 minutes until we got to Cloncurry, we were excited because we wanted to go to Woolworths and get some icy poles and a few other items.

Just before this happened, maybe about 5 or 20 minutes earlier we discussed the rules of the bush that we had read about the day before (see pic above). We have discussed travelling/driving rules with the girls many times, however, I just felt to have another discussion about these things on this day. We discussed how we are very prepared if we ever got stuck on the side of the road again (we got stuck on the side of the road on new years eve 2015 in Lismore, Victoria). We discussed how we all would need to stay calm and remain with our caravan and vehicle, and that we had plenty of supplies if we were stuck for a while. I thought we had a good chat!

As we were driving we suddenly heard a loud thump sound and are grinding sound, I actually thought we had run over some metal. I looked directly at Shane and I immediately could tell by the look on his face something was wrong. Shane had just enough time to pull over to the side as the vehicle DIED! WHAT, OH NO NOT AGAIN! My heart started beating quickly, I asked Shane what happened? Did it die? His response was YES! I turned to look at the girls, their beautiful faces just dropped..I quickly turned into Mama Bear and concentrated on reassuring them and making them feel that all would be fine, and made them feel comfortable. Shane looked over the vehicle but didn't know what was wrong. It was a stinking hot day, thankfully I had put some primas and zooper doopers in the freezer the day before, so I gave the girls the zooper doopers to cool down, and made sure they felt reassured. The girls began praying while Shane and I prayed and worked out what to do next. What was quite Amazing was that we actually had somewhere to stop safely, and we actually had just a couple of bars of reception on our mobile phones...THANK YOU GOD xo 50 meters back and about 50 meters in front of us there was no where to stop and no reception. In fact, everyone who stopped to ask if we needed help, asked us how do you have reception...THANK YOU GOD xo And that is another thing, so many people stopped, so many other travellers and people driving along that road stopped to ask if we needed any help. Every time someone stopped I got a little emotional (but I sucked up the tears so the girls wouldn't see me emotional and get more emotional themselves) because it warmed my heart to see so many people show such care/love/compassion to strangers. One couple in particular that stopped, we had met back at Normanton, they were our neighbours at Normanton. They stayed with us a while until they found out that RACV was coming to check out our vehicle.

That was the other thing...We were on the phone to RACV for quite some time. We were thankful we had reception to call them. Shane told RACV about the situation we were in, Shane told them we had full total care with them, RACV told Shane that our names were not coming up, which meant we had no cover, WHAT! My heart beat raced that little bit more once again. How could we have no cover, we arranged FULL total care cover before we started our trip (we'd be crazy not to), in fact, we had used our cover back in January when they again made a mistake and let us stay on the side of the road on new years eve for 10 hours because they had mixed us up with another couple in Lismore, N.S.W, we were in Lismore, Victoria...Anyway we remained calm and just did what we had to do to get us and our beautiful girls in a much safer situation. We were told over the phone we would have to sign up there and then to basic cover for 2 years and pay for it over the phone, so we did, we were told we would not have total care and that someone would come out and asses our vehicle and may tow our vehicle but possibly not our caravan. We accepted what RACV said and decided we would deal with it when we and our children were safe and sound at the caravan park.

A little while after our neighbours from Normanton (Doug and his lovely wife) left us, they had called us to see how we were doing. They were actaully going to go and stay at Julia Creek (about 1h 40m drive from Cloncurry), however, they decided to wait around for us at the caravan park in Cloncurry, so that they could drive over 45 minutes back to us and tow our caravan back another 45 minutes to Cloncurry using their vehicle, WOWSA! 
These people we had met the night before paid to stay at a caravan park they hadn't planned on staying at, just so they could drive 45 minutes back to where we were stranded, so that Doug could hitch our caravan to his vehicle and then tow our caravan back another 45 minutes to the caravan park...THANK YOU GOD for GREAT, Compassionate, Beautiful People. Thank You to Doug and his lovely wife xo We appreciate You xo

Well, 2 1/2 hours after our vehicle died on the side of the road a tow truck arrived and picked up our vehicle and caravan and gave us a vehicle to drive ourselves to Cloncurry, YAY!

We arrived at Cloncurry at about 3:30pm. We unpacked our vehicle, and watched our vehicle get towed away once again to the tow truck depot.
We have now been here in Cloncurry since Saturday (nearly 1 week)...We still don't know what is going on with our vehicle and we don't know if RACV is going to cover the tow and our accommodation...We don't have a vehicle, so we are walking everywhere..it's great exercise! We are just waiting and praying. 
Shane has made many phone calls to the mechanics, RACQ and RACV, but we really aren't any closer at knowing what's going on. We were initially told the problem would most likely be the crank shaft which could cost us in excess of $10,000 with many labour hours to fix it...(Please God No)...and last we heard, we were told it could be the drive plate which could cost in excess of possibly $3,000 to $4,000 with many hours of labour to fix that, Oh No!

You know what..I may sound crazy, however, in all of this drama going on around us we are all handling it very well. I am proud of our girls, they have learned to cope well and pray in times of difficulty. Shane and I have become better at handling difficult situations also, I think that comes with practice and most of all Trust and Faith in GOD...Our FAITH in GOD has seen us through many things, and Our FAITH in GOD will see us through many more.
We truly believe God has us in the palm of HIS most Beautiful hands xoxox

Please pray with us! Pray for all things to work out well regarding our vehicle, our finance, RACV and RACQ. Pray for God to use us while we are stuck here in a small mining town, with nothing much here. I know we will make the most of our stay, we always do. So please cover us in prayer during this time xo
Thank You in advance for praying for us we truly appreciate it xo

So we will see how things turn out and I'll update you all when anything changes...For now we will make the most of being here in HOT Cloncurry :-) We will still smile and laugh, have fun, explore and make the most of this time here together...It's not the end of the world, it's a Hiccup!

Hoping everyone has had a great week xo
Take Care and Tell your loved ones you Love them :-D
Love Dimi xo 

Our Next Stop..Normanton...

Our next stop was Normanton, only 155km from Croydon and it took us about 2 hours to get there, so are nice short drive. The road was much the same as the drive from Mareeba to Croydon, single lane and double lane roads, many road trains speeding past, and a whole lot of wildlife. As always we had to be very careful of all the animals that border the roadsides and at times dart across the road. Some of the animals/wildlife that we have seen inland so far either on the road side, or darting across the front of our vehicle have been, tree kangaroos, a large rat, many large cows, large flamingo/duck looking birds, emus, eagles, and some vulture type birds that enjoy eating the road kill and that dart at your windscreen at any given time.
At some stage as we drove along, a road train came flying past us as they do, we were pulled over allowing it to safely pass and some little stones came flying off the truck and onto our windscreen and chipped our windscreen in 2 places, bummer, however, everyone was safe and that's the main thing (later that day we had the windscreen repaired, it wasn't cheap but worth it, we didn't want to risk any further damage to the windscreen).
 
When we arrived to Normanton we stopped and explored the town first this time. We checked out the information centre and the small museum they have there. We checked out and took many pics of the huge crocodile replica that is on display in the town park, and then hurried to our site so that we could hop into the pool because once again it was a beautiful, dry, stinking HOT day! 
Normanton had the biggest pool we've seen in any campground/caravan park, it was amazing and we believe it once was the towns public pool, Wowsa! 

Our drive to Normanton, and Our Exploring Normanton Pics... 

Driving from Croydon to Normanton...

Nearly there...

Welcome to Normanton...Population 1500, Wowsa!

Very interesting info...Do you believe this is the actual size of a croc being caught many years ago, however, there is no evidence...Believe it or Not!

Oh NO!

This was the towns information centre. The centre also had the usual interesting museum, this one was a small museum but it was interesting as always...

This is the drive we are doing along the Savannah Way, the only difference is we plan to go down the middle first (well hopefully)...

Keep this in mind! We read this and explained it to the Girls...we've actually explained this and many safety rules (for travelling) with the girls many times, we just went over them once again...

Interesting Museum...

We were hungry, it was lunchtime but we thought we'd stop in the town to explore before we had some lunch. Not even a minute after we stepped into the info centre, the lady who worked there offered us some treats, YUM, Thank You Very Much!

The Travelling Bible made it to Normanton :-) As we've been travelling around, we pray for each area we visit, we share Gods Love, talk about Church, and show people Love by random acts of kindness, and sometimes God shows us exactly who to talk to and what to say to them, our hearts jump for JOY when this happens....THANK YOU GOD xo

The Travelling Bible...

We both enjoy having a chat it is a big part of what we are doing chatting with people around Australia... however, Shane really LOVES to have a chat all the time, he is on a whole different have a chat level, Hahaha! So as Shane was talking to a man named Steve, he knew straight away God had somethings to say to him. Shane arranged to catch up with Steve and chat with him some more once Steve put his children to bed for the night.

That night myself and the Girls went to bed while Shane was able to minister to Steve for many hours. Steve was an example of quite a few people we have come across on this journey, people who once knew and lived for God, however, something happened in their life and they turned away from Him.

Both Shane and Steve knew God had sent us to minister to him, and we all believe God was preparing his heart to turn it back to HIM.

We weren't even meant to stop at this caravan park, we were meant to go straight to a free camp, however, the sun was extremely HOT and we decided we wanted to refresh in the pool and have air conditioning for the night (we aim to buy a generator in the future, hopefully, so we can run our aircon at all the free/bush/farm camps we go to), we are so glad we changed our plans, so VERY glad :-)

God directed us to Steve. It warms our hearts to know we played are part in getting him connected with God once again...Thank You God for Your AMAZING perfect timing xo Thank You God SOOOOO VERY much for using us xo

We ask that you please continue to pray for us, for Normanton and for each and every area we visit. THANK YOU SOOOOO VERY MUCH xoxox

 

Our Normanton Site...

The Girls were so happy to be so close to the large Pool..Can you see it?

The Huge Refreshing Pool..We were in it for hours, then went back in for a late night dip and then went back in at 6:30am for a dip before we left Normanton in the morning, it was so much Fun...we even enjoyed star gazing in the pool.

And that was Normanton! We explored it, enjoyed the pool, rested for a night with our cool airconditioner and left in the morning for our long drive to Cloncurry...now brace yourself, the next post is a bit different to the last few posts...

Hoping everyone is enjoying their week xo
Take Care,
Dimi xo 

Moving Everyday along the Savannah Way...

Our next stop was a 6 hour drive inland to Croydon, North Queensland. We covered about 500km with 2 rest breaks. We left Mareeba at about 6:30am and we arrived at Croydon at about 2:30pm. We did our quick overnight set up (caravan legs down, took a few things out of the caravan to give us space to move around, and not much else) and then we hit the pool for a few refreshing hours, had some dinner and off to bed. We actually hit the sack around 7pm and didn't move until about 7am, we were exhausted after a 5:30am wake up the morning before and a looong day on the road!

Goodbye Mareeba, we are off to Croydon now...

The scenery changed dramatically as we drove along...from fog, fully sealed roads, lush green trees/bushes and green hills to dry grass, red dirt, sealed and dirt roads, and lots of wildlife...

Getting closer...

A much needed Rest stop...

The Savannah Way...From Cairns to Broome...

After a good nights sleep since we had a much shorter drive ahead, we took our time packing up, enjoying a GREAT coffee (we had power hook up so that meant we could finally use our milk frother after 3 days of flat milk, Hahaha, the sacrifices we make, Haha!). After we were all refreshed we explored the Croydon town for 1 1/2 and then took off to our next stop.

Some of our pics travelling to Croydon and Croydon pics...

Single Lane road. The roads go from smoother sealed, double lane roads, to these single lane roads along the way to Croydon...

The Scenery...Check out the Red dirt...The Blue skies, Green trees and Red dirt are such beautiful Australian Outback colours!

These ant/termite mounds are everywhere...

From double lane, to single lane roads...

When a Road Train is ahead, ALWAYS, Always pull over to the side when on a single lane road...NEVER expect the road train to pull to the side, it is far to dangerous for them to attempt to pull over to the side of the road..Always pull over slowly, calmly and wait for the road train to go past...

The never ending Road...

Next Rest stop...Georgetown...

Do you believe these Georgetown Public swimming pools are free to use? You just need to get a token (I think it was from the information centre), then sign a clause because there are no lifeguards on duty, and then you are free to enjoy the day swimming in the refreshing clean pools! We did not get to enjoy the pool, Shane would not let us because he is a party pooper and just wanted to hurry up, Hahaha! So we ate our lunch, freshened up and hit the road again...

Not too Far now...

The Travelling Bible made it to Croydon :-) As we travel through Croydon and the surrounding areas, and as we travel through The Savannah Way, I ask you continue to pray for each and every area we visit...Pray for the people of each and every single town we drive through, stand on, stay in...Pray for their hearts to be softened to God and HIS Beautiful LOVE and FORGIVENESS xo Thank You so Very much for Praying for us and for each and every area we visit on our Journey xo

Our Croydon Set Up...Unless we must drive somewhere we stay hitched for our overnight set up...

GREAT Morning Coffee :-)

Now we all thought this simple general store was a bit special. This store is the oldest running store in Australia. It is pretty cool. It has a little museum attached to it, and it is worth having a look in the store and buying something from it to support the business so that it can remain open for many years to come!

The Travelling Bible, hold it high and proud...

Inside the cool General Store...

This side of the store is the Museum part...

The Girls liked the Type Writer...

The Girls liked the cool Ink Pens...

I really liked these gorgeous/old Glass bottles...

I really like old Floorboards...

The General Store Comment book...The Girls were asked to write what they thought of the store in this General Store Comment book, and so they did :-)

We then checked out the whole town. We could stroll through the street of old buildings and have a glimpse of what life was like in the older days, Haha...it was pretty cool. Our favourite was the real old court house, you could see/hear/experience a real case in action, it was quite interesting for all of us...

I Love the look and feel of some of these old buildings/homes...

Old Jail...

The Courthouse...

And then we were off..on the Road again :-D

I think I'm going to like these one night sleepovers, exploring, and hours of driving...well for now anyway :-D
I Hope Everyone is Well xo
Take Care,
Love Dimi xo