We were a little unsure about going to church on Sunday. it’s a rough town, no church, no leadership, only a handful of members. I felt like we should go and encouraged the family to do so. I’m so glad we did. Like the other branches we’ve attended the members were wonderful. 
The branch meets in the CWA Hall (Cowboy Women’s Hall). It’s a fairly nice, small community center. As we drove up, the missionaries (Elder Fietonu from Tonga, Elder Tsang from Hong Kong) welcomed us. We chatted for a few minutes and then they introduced us to a delightful lady named Barbara, an Aborigine sister in the gospel.
It’s hard to describe how it’s felt seeing the Aborigine people and feeling like they are so lost in the world. It’s been both bewildering and depressing at the same time. Meeting Barbara restored my hope that adapting to this new and strange lifestyle can be done. She’s lived in Tennant Creek here whole life and is an interpreter at the local courthouse. She was so happy and cheerful, it couldn’t help but rub off.
Another member we met was Kate, she moved here a year or so ago from Alice Springs. She and the missionaries switch off each week giving the talks in Sacrament Meeting. Today would be different though, we actually got to see a session of conference!! it was great. The first we’ve seen.
As we left Tennant Creek still heading north, we saw a fire and ended up being stopped for about 20 minutes while the fire moved away from the road. A fire in the Outback is never a good thing because there’s no water to put it out. It pretty much just has to burn itself out unless it’s close enough to a settlement that can help in some way with bulldozers.
Unfortunately, we saw this all along our way. Luckily they weren’t massive fires like we get in the States where whole mountains are burned but lots of smaller patches.
One thing we did notice was the termite mounds we thought were huge are nothing compared to the ones we saw when we started heading east. These are much bigger in diameter where as we’ve heard the ones up north are taller.
There’s no shortage of bugs out here besides termites. At each stop we spent a considerable amount of time trying to clean them off.
It was a long drive to Mt. Isa, the Rodeo capitol of Australia. Like many of the other towns in the Outback it’s a mining town. It didn’t strike me as being nearly as rough as some of the others though. They have a LDS branch along with the other essentials: Mackers (McDonalds), KMart and Coles (grocery store).
Mt. Isa to Charter Towers was a really long drive. We just kept telling ourselves if we make it through today we’ll almost be to the coast. There really wasn’t a lot to see along the way as far as landscape 
goes. As we drove east you could see the vegetation change from desert to more tropical. The things that stand out about the drive are seeing the occasional emu, a few kangaroos, lots of birds eating road kill, and many road trains.
We’re now in a little town called Charter Towers. Today we’ll head to the coast where we’ll spend a few days enjoying the beach and hopefully get out to the Great Barrier Reef.
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