Untitled Document

Day 4

Monday, 17th September
Tambo - Longreach

Tambo
Blackall
Isisford
Infracombe
Longreach

Distance Traveled

Today - 408 km

Total - 1888 km

Blog

After a good sleep, we packed up quickly, but had to wait til 8.30 for the Tambo bears shop to open. We went back to Fanny Mais (the local cafe) for a morning cuppa to wait.

There was this young teenager jackaroo waiting for his first job. He had his new cowboy shirt and 2 gallon hat waiting for his boss to show up. I think there was a bit of a shock when they met. His boss just wore a worn out old baseball cap and didn't give a damn about the style of things. Boy, was this young fella in for a shock.

The next shock was ours when the Tambo teddie shop opened. It was far smaller than what were expecting. A very tiny building with a few teddies scattered around (most over $100). They were all nice and hand made with the lady sitting in the corner sewing them together.

We got some cheap memorabilia and headed off.

Next was Isisford (eye-sis-ford). This little town only made it into our itenery because it had a couple of caches.

The trip to the town was on a nice wide bitemun road going through many farms with many grids on the way.

We saw quite a few emus and a lot of stock that we hadn't seen for a long time.

In 100ks we only passed one other car. There was a tripple road train, but it was off the road filling up with cattle.

Isisford was a small town trying to grab the tourists. It only had a couple of streets and besides the dozen local cars, a few caravans driving around the block.

My interest of the caches, had me caching into the local primary school. It was like they were waiting for the next visitor.

The other cache was far more interesting. This took me out to the local cemetary. I drove out in the right direction, but missed the turn. It was like a track across the padock. I backtracked and made it there. You could see it from miles and could have driven anywhere to get there. Roads were just places people had driven more than once.

The kids did their music, violin and piano practice in the local park and then we left.

The road out of Isisford wasn't so nice. It was single lane and we had to pull off the road often to let buses and road trains past.

We finally made it to Ilfracombe and looked at their machinery mile. Did a cache and moved on. They have a whole mile dedicated to old restored machinery. It was very interesting.

We reached Longreache and decided to do Qantas. This is the outback town where the Qantas airline started. We did the qantas museum. Interesting stories and exibhits about their pioneering days. They had these old statistics like an 11 hour trip to Winton (the next town on our list), or just 8 hours motorised could be done in just 1.5 hours. We planned on doing this one in an hour by modern car.

We then did a shop and set up camp.

Bridget cooked us all steak in the spirit of the countryside.

After dinner I took the kids to a Bush Poetry reading. It was very entertaining. A bloke in bare feat told peoms and jokes around a crowd sitting in the dust.

Setting up camp is getting much easier.

The home of the Tambo Teddys