We decided to cut straight for the East coast as quickly as possible. First night we stayed at the roadhouse in Renner Springs. Second day we drove to Mt Isa which was a long way - our biggest drive of the trip. It seemed like we were in the car for days. On the way to Mt Isa we had to stop on the road while some cattle were herded across a bridge. We saw the cattlemen driving the cattle on horses. Luckily we arrived in Mt Isa just before the caravan park closed. Mum was getting a bit worried.
We saw the big mine at Mt Isa but didn't have time to tour around. Dad said they mine copper, lead, zinc and silver. They have problems with lead dust from the mine.
The next day (Liv's birthday!) we drove to Hughenden and stopped off at Kronosaurus Korner in Richmond on the way. A long time ago the ocean covered big parts of inland Australia including where Richmond is today. Some of the local farmers have discovered lots of fossils of dinosaurs that lived in the ocean about 100 million years ago. The museum at Richmond has some of the best preserved fossils of these animals, called Pliosaurs, in the world. Kronosaurus was the biggest one - it grew up to about 10 metres long - and it ate other animals in the sea (it was a carnivore). We had special talking phones which told us facts about the dinosaurs and how they found the dinosaurs.
That night we celebrated Liv's birthday with a special dinner at the Royal hotel in Hughenden. Henry had dinosaur nuggets.
On the fourth day we drove to Townsville and stopped for lunch at Charters Towers. Charters Towers was famous for a gold rush in the late 19th century when an aboriginal boy called Jupiter discovered a nugget in a nearby creek. Charters Towers was nicknamed "the world" because people said there was no better place to live and you could get everything you wanted there. We walked around to look at some of the old buildings and visited the information centre where they showed us a video about the history of the town.
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