Pre - Historic Times 12 - 07 - 11

 Our first dirt road with caravan
near Winton, Queensland

It seems like a common trend, however after another cold night we woke to a beautiful clear morning,  had a leisurely start to the day .  Yet again I made Gill breakfast while she sat waiting sitting up in bed, like lady bloody muck!  As stated yesterday we have been free camping in Longreach and although there are toilet facilities available we have been able to use the shower and toilet in the caravan.

Today we had decided that we would be leaving heading to Hughenden with some time spent on the way doing a side trip, well best made plans of men and Gill we never stopped at Hughenden - we actually got as far as Pentland and a free camping area approx 36 k’s past there – a total of some 100+ k’s past where we were going to stop, never mind a good day.

 Dinosaur bones securely wrapped
before surrounding rock chipped away

Now the side trip.  We went to a place called Australian Age of Dinosaurs, this is about 175 k’s north west of Longreach at a place called Winton and is fantastic – we learned that 109,000,000 years ago these things apparently wandered Australia and killed stuff - were enormous then just all up and died quite weird really.  The strangest thing really is the fact that people spend hours getting bones out of the ground – bones that look a lot like rocks really and yet they form part of our history.  The second 

Staff member working on the
knuckle bone of a dinosaur

 Volunteer who flew into Winton
to assist with task of removing
bone from rock

part that was amazing was the fact that they have a number of volunteers who actually not only give up their time to clean up or as they call it preparing the bones but actually pay for the privilege of doing so.

The bone (grey area) being
chipped away

The task of removing the
rock from the bones

The Guide who took us around would have probably been in her mid 20’s and her excitement and understanding of things 109,00,0000 years old was simply amazing. 




Anyway we spent three hours there and would seriously suggest that if you are passing by their gate then stop and just see it all – well worth the $20 ea that it cost us.

We then continued on still observing lots of road kill until finally pulling into the free camping at or about 8 o’clock.  Not really an exciting day to write about but there you go!  We travelled around 500 kms through North West Queensland outback with only two towns and three or four very small settlements of about ten houses.  Again plenty of road trains with varying numbers of trailers that certainly give us a wobble with the wind draught as they pass us.