We have a day in Longreach today, so we are staying at the Longreach Tourist Caravan Park for the 2 nights. Today is a bit of a “doing the touristy things in Longreach” day.
Part of me thinks that it is nice staying at the one place for a couple of nights so I get to sleep in the same bed 2 nights running, but we are actually sleeping in the same bed every night anyway.
But it is nice not having to run through my mental checklist of hooking up Elsie, packing down the van and being out of the park by 10.00am … and then driving the next 50km wondering what significant thing that I’d forgotten to do.
And that – as you know already – when coupled with poor plumbing leads me to have to stop and check.
Poor plumbing and OCD – what a winning combination!
So today we kicked off the day at the Stockman’s Hall of Fame.
Actually, that’s not strictly correct. We kicked off the day with the usual ablutions and breakfast on the front porch …
… but I don’t want to bore you with all of the minutiae of everyday life.
If I wanted to give you the full details of everything we do, not only will this blog will go forever, but I’d be forced to tell you that I also emptied the caravan toilet this morning at the dump point next to the camp kitchen because the light had come on, and that’s not exactly compelling reading … much less something that I want to record for posterity.
But now that I’ve brought it up, I actually don’t know why the dump point is located so close to the camp kitchen … but that is a rabbit-hole that I definitely don’t care to go down.
So we woke, had our ablutions, had breakfast outside in a pleasant 17 degrees or so, although that 17 degrees had this kind of veiled threat of a much hotter day to come.
I may not have mentioned that when we arrived in Longreach yesterday, the first thing that I did once we’d plugged in the power was to turn on the A/C in the van.
Today was going to be another one of those days. There was this warm blustery wind blowing.
After breakfast we did the dishes …. sorry, fast-forward to the Stockman’s Hall of Fame.
This whole COVID-19 thing means that you can’t just rock up to attractions here in Longreach – you have to pre-book and arrive at your allocated time.
You then go through the normal routine of hand sanitising etc before you get to the good stuff.
We spent a pleasant few hours browsing all of the exhibits, watching the Stockman’s documentary, and reading all about the unsung hero’s of the outback.
That picture above reminds me that we are having steak for dinner. Yum!
That bullock wagon in the picture above is full sized, so you can see how big they are! I’m 183cm tall and I fitted neatly underneath it.
Many of the stories of the unsung heros were really interesting and show how hard must have been back at the turn of the last century (early 1900s).
There were, however, two things to note about these heros:
- Many of them were reproductive over-achievers. I think that the winner had 12 sons and 8 daughters … and I can only assume that this all happened before TV and they had nothing else to do, or perhaps the nights were very cold …?
- Many of them had really cool names, like Splinter Morrison.
Why couldn’t my parents have given me a cool name like “Splinter”, or ”Spike” or “Randy” … hmmm, maybe not Randy.
So I decided to spice things up a bit by giving Kerri and I cowboy names for the rest of today’s blog.
I will henceforth be known as Luther ‘Scarface’ Taylor, and Kerri will be Erma ‘Lucky’ Taylor.
Anyhow, as I was saying, Erma and I spent a pleasant few hours looking around the SHoF and came out into approx 30 degrees heat at around 12.30pm.
We went for a quick spin down to the river, and then back to the van for a bite of lunch.
It’s a funny thing – the street names in Longreach are mostly named after birds.
Even stranger, the east-west streets are named after water-based birds (Duck St, Swan St, Pelican St), while the north-south streets are named after land-based birds (Pidgeon Ln, Parrot Ln, Cassowary St) and so on.
And they go on and on and on.
Clearly the early settlers out here had a limited imagination.
So we had lunch and started thinking about our next afternoon outing – Smithy’s Outback Adventure (Thompson River Cruise).
We putted around for an hour or so in the air-conditioned comfort of the van, before heading out the front at 2.15pm to the front of the caravan park ready for the pick-up by Smithy.
It was 32 degrees. And it stayed 32 degrees for most of the afternoon.
We went on the river cruise with Neil and Des – I mentioned them in yesterday’s post. They will henceforth be known as Beauford and Mildred Dawson.
So Erma and I, along with Beauford and Mildred waited out front in 32 degree heat waiting for Smithy to come along in his bus to pick us up.
We were taken out to the Thompson River, which is not actually a river at all, but a series of waterholes. Today we went on the Longreach Waterhole which goes for 10.4km.
Prior to embarkation, everyone was told that we would get a shot of pure alcohol.
It sounded a bit like saloon time from the old West, but it was actually COVID-19 precautions and we got hand sanitiser.
Not entirely unexpected, I guess.
Our riverboat crew were introduced to us as Miss Jane and Captain Corky.
I thought it was a joke … but it wasn’t – they actually called each other by those names … and I kind of felt like I was trapped in an episode of Mr Squiggle.
We also learned that the local Aboriginals used to use the trees along the shore of the Longreach waterhole for making canoes using the bark.
In the picture above you can see the scar where the canoe was carved out of the tree – possibly a couple of hundred years ago.
Very pretty trip along the river, good commentary and generally a pleasant afternoon puttering up the river in a boat with twin 27HP diesel motors.
Just for comparison, Elsie (remember Elsie?) has probably 10 times the HP that the boat has. Which reminds me – did you figure out why Kerri Erma called the car Elsie?
As we got off the boat storm clouds started rolling in, so it was good timing that we were back in the bus and heading back to the caravan park for dinner.
Dinner tonight? Steak 🙂
Tomorrow we head off to Winton. I hear that the water is pretty bad there – lots of sulphur smell in the water – so I might fill the tanks and take some purified Longreach waterhole water with me.
Time for coffee, then bed.
Ciao
You give a most interesting report of your travels. I am waiting for the next episode!!!