Today’s pleasant surprises were two-fold.
Next to last night’s campground at Camooweal is a huge truck parking area capable of holding a dozen road trains. While Debbie and I were packing up this morning, the boys were playing just outside the fence, in full view of this truck stop, Jesse riding his bike through a puddle repeatedly, with Max watching him. Then a road train drove in and did a U turn right in front of them, which got them yelling and jumping with excitement. Then another did the same. And later on, three trains drove out in succession, again right beside them ... the drivers could see an excited pair of boys and they waved, one even honked! And of course the boys came straight over to tell us all about it, simultaneously, at the top of their voices.
The second surprise came at Mount Isa, which we had written off during our brief stay a month ago as an ugly, dirty, boring mining town. Today we looked for a park to have some lunch, and the trusty iPhone led us to Family Fun Park, which surely must be the biggest and most varied playground in the country. It has some unique play equipment, like a pedal carousel and a see-saw maypole. It has a huge water playground, at least twice the size of Broome’s. It has a cool bike/scooter track with lots of obstacles and real road signs, including, where one of the roads comes to a dead end, an “end of road” warning sign and a black and white marker sign like this >>. It has dual side-by-side flying foxes for racing purposes. It even has a “scented playground” consisting of a herb garden; a nice idea, but most of the plants seem to have perished. And, of course, the toilets. High-tech, fully-automatic and self-cleaning, the “Exeloo” even plays elevator music as you sit for your arbitrary maximum of ten minutes, after which the door opens and the floor sprayers start squirting. And if you need a buddy to come in with you, remind them not to wash their hands while you are still sitting, because it will trigger a violent automatic flush, which may be somewhat disconcerting. Eh, Max?