Lake Elphinstone and Melbourne cup day in Bowen

Lake Elphinstone is located 25k south east of the mining township of Glenden which has a population of around 1000 people. The lake covers an area of 310 hectares so it is a decent size. The camp site has toilets and hot showers with the hot water supplied by way of a donkey. For those of you that don't Know what a donkey is it is as follows;
2 x 200 litre drums That sit over a wood fire, inside the drums there are coils of copper tube, the drums are filled with water to keep the copper tubes immersed which in turn is heated by the wood fire. The water pressure pushes cold water into the coils and the hot water travels through the inside of the copper tube and is preheated by the wood fire. Each day around 3pm the wood fire is lit and tendered by whoever is around at the time. The same principle as the coils of black poly pipe on the roof of houses to heat the swimming pool water. We tried finding a place to put the red craw pots in but to shallow and not having a boat so no red craw. There is not much around here to do except relax and read a book. Glenden is a mining town and on the weekend the locals arrive at lake Elpinstone with all there big toys like jet skis, and great big v8 powered jet boats and tow all manor of skiers and water tubes. They piss up during the day and most of the night then hopefully bugger off on Sunday to leave us grey nomads in peace again.
4th November
Well it's been a interesting weekend with no sleep while the locals piss up Friday/Saturday night till way after midnight,Saturday night went till 3:30 am and with very hot days and heaps of beer its a bad mix.Some idiot decided to do a burn out in a ute about 10.30 last night obviously full of beer,I don't know how he didn't lose control of his car anyway there were a few locals that chased the ute and tore a strip off him and told him to "f..k off" and never come back if he did that again. We are very disappointed in the local coal miners as they are bloody inconsiderate, have disgusting personal habits, leave bloody rubbish around everywhere and have loud music and smokey fires going until all hours. Several of them have pig dogs that were roaming around and annoying other campers and of course there was a dog fight around 1:00 am this morning just to add to the excitement. We will never bother supporting central QLD mining towns ever again so they can get stuffed as far as we are concerned. Other grey nomads that are camped here have said the same thing, bugger the mining towns as most of the locals are bloody idiots! We had kept the gents toilets clean and tidy then once the locals arrived and within 4 hours the toilets were in the most disgusting condition I have ever seen so we gave them a wide berth! We will be moving on as far as we can from here that is for sure!
Our camping neighbors decided to follow us into Bowen for Melbourne cup day and we both set up camp in the Wangaratta caravan park and booked in for a couple of days. The caravan park managers put on a Champagne breakfast starting at 9:00 and we had to supply our own drinks while they provided the food. What a great day we had and we staggered back to the vans just before dark. It was a bloody long breakfast that's for sure. The girls had a beauty contest as well as broom races so there were plenty of pictures taken. As there were a shortage of brooms some of the girls had to straddle leaf racks so that looked really daggy to say the least.
We are leaving tomorrow heading to the Bowen river pub and will be camping at "terrible creek" until we start our job at the pub on the 15th November.