Boulia Camel Races - Finally!

Well, we've had some very wet, soggy, windy, days here at Boulia!  We've trudged through the mud and rain so many times to get to the toilets and showers and the main grandstand that we're all pretty good at mud-skiing.  Everyone is still in very good spirits, even though we don't know whether the track will ever dry out for the camels to actually run.  Lots of vans and cars are now so encircled by mudholes that there's no point trying to get out anyhow - and all the roads out of Boulia are cut because of rain, so we might as well just make the best of it.

The organisers are doing their very best to make sure that other events are still happening, and trying to provide entertainment in spite of all the problems.  The Rock n Roll night still went ahead, and I'm happy to say that we Canberrans were the ONLY people to actually get dressed up in our 50's gear and do a bit of Rock n Roll dancing on the Friday night!  We certainly made an entrance, and had a great time.  There was another group from Newcastle, I think, that dressed up as Elvises and they were having a good time too.  Our little group, together with some of the Camel Riders (all girls) had our photo taken to go in the North West Star newspaper in Mt Isa.  We had a ball!

The Camel Races didn't actually run on the Saturday or Sunday, but they did some camel tagging, rodeo events, gumboot throwing and tugs-of-war throughout the weekend, with a really good fireworks display on Saturday night.  The organisers finally managed to bring in  a grader to clear and grade the track for some races to go ahead on the Monday, so we did actually get to see some of the camels run on Monday morning before we headed to Mt Isa.  Trev and I had a bet on the second race, and came second - the odds that the only bookie left at the track was giving were so bad that we bet $10 and won only $6.50!  Not a great effort, but we can at least say we had a bet at Boulia Camel Races!

Monday afternoon we split up - Lai and Garry are heading for Winton, Lorraine and Bill are going back to Brisbane, and we are headed for Mt Isa together with Carole and John.  However, all the caravan parks were booked up (everybody escaping from Boulia once the road was clear), so we spent the night about 40kms south of Mt Isa on a clearing at the side of the road.  We had a good meal, another roaring fire, then arrived in Mt Isa early on Tuesday morning.  

We visited 'Outback in Mt Isa' and booked an underground mine tour, then arrived at our caravan park where we caught up on washing before going on the tour.  It cost $44 pp (seniors concession) and took a couple of hours.  It was very interesting, but probably a bit expensive for what we actually got.  

Tomorrow we are heading to Lawn Hill for a couple of days - it's supposed to be beautiful, and the weather has cleared up, so we're looking forward to it.