Sun 26th – We had a lovely quiet night, the nights are cooler again, makes it better for sleeping.
Warning don’t fill up the water tanks in Winton. They state in their literature that the water has a strong sulphur smell coming out of the bore. They have cooling tanks to cool the tanks and helps lets some of the sulphur dioxide evaporate. They warn that water coming out of the town taps still has a strong sulphur smell but that is soon goes either when boiled or let the water sit for a while. And they claim its so good it’s worth bottling. Ha yeah right. We forgot to check it first and filled the tanks, it has a strong smell when you are having a shower and has a yucky taste in your tea. So we will buy some bottled water to drink until we hit better water supplies. Don’t know what Longreach is like. Just looked it up, (on the council web site) Longreach is now on river water, used to be bore water as well, but the river water supply can run dry as it can everywhere, so best to carry water when you can. Interesting article that includes some info on water issues in Longreach. Pretty well all the outback towns we have been too have been bore water, some good some not so good.
By the time we filled up with juice, found a supermarket, headed out to the Stockman Hall of Fame and had morning tea is was just after 11am, when we walked through the doors. There was a show that started at 11am so we missed that but you did have to pay extra but if it was anything like the rest of the place it would have been worth it.
Entry was $29.50 A, there are 5 galleries that lead from one to another. The place was huge, we thought we would have it done within a few hrs, ha. You get a wrist band so you can come out, which we did for lunch. We also heard someone being told late in the day entry covered 2 days. After lunch we finished galleries 4 & 5, watched a movie and checked out the art gallery.
The hall of fame covers the history and development of the outback, (and Australia) the explorers that blazed the trails, the cattlemen and stockman that opened it up, also a gallery on the RFDS, and the last gallery was on the stock workers. It was all really well done, you could easy spend a day there.
We had hoped to do the Qantas Founders Museum etc. but we ran out of time, we have booked in for the 9.30am tour tomorrow, passes are for 2 days.
We were going to stay at the rest area 4 km’s out of town but it was literally packed with vans, worse than a caravan park. So we ducked back to one 24kms out that we passed on the way in that we saw had dirt tracks leading off it into the scrub. A few others have done the same, good spot.
