Day Four
We awoke on day four to another sub zero night but not as cold as we had earlier (we also discovered that our sleeping bags zip together...as Roger Moore said in the 1976 classic James Bond film “ to survive we need to share bodily warmth” great script writing). Onto Longreach today and something we were really looking forward to. We stopped in Tambo to look at the famous Tambo teddies being made and I was amazed to see a couple bring in their collection of teddies to select another addition to the family to make sure it fitted with the other twenty they had. They were very nice guys and they sure loved those teddies. We also saw our first bottle tree today at Blackall and stopped for the compulsory photo opportunity... the girls are still not sure how they get bottles from these trees!! Blackall as well as being home to bottle trees is also the home of the actual black stump (yes it does really exist). This was a prominant land mark used by surveyors to gain bearings from and it is from this landmark that the saying "the other side of the black stump actually comes from. Next onto Barcaldine and where the the labor party was born, so we now know who is responsible for Kevin 07. I’m sure you all remember that the “tree of knowledge” was recently posioned and is currently being preserved in Brisbane so it can be returned (this was the site of the shearers strike meeting of 1891 and the birth of trade unionism and the labour party in Australia). Not that much to see but the best sausages I have ever tasted from the local butcher. We had also now come to grips with the reality of those huge road trains that thunder along at alarming speed. As you can see from the photo they are big but little did we know at this stage that this one is small by comparison as we later saw others over 55 metres long with four semi trailers on.
Finally onto Longreach for a few days. It is really a great site to see the tail of that Qantas jumbo loom ahead as you drive into Longreach.