9 May 2012 - Longreach

We were not really interested in paying the admission prices to the Qantas museum and Stockmans Hall of Fame, the main tourist draw cards in Longreach and instead headed for the guided tour of the Longreach School of Distance Education. The school covers a massive area of QLD and it was very interesting to find out about how education works over such vast distances. The general comment from people on the tour who knew of people who had been through similar schools was that they were usually well ahead of students at similar age/grade levels in traditional schools.

After the tour we decided to get haircuts for Em and Lachie. It was mainly for Lachie's benefit as his hair was starting to go wild. Despite bribery of a packet of smarties, he went ballistic and the hairdresser did well to get some of it cut off.

Smarties in hand, we headed out to the town of Ilfracombe about 20 mins south east of Longreach as we had heard about the mile of machinery that lines the main street through town. We were not disappointed and the kiddies spent nearly 2 hours climbing on every tractor, truck, bulldozer, grader they could find. There were also several free museums along the way and once again an unexpected gem of our trip.

With exhausted kids we headed back to Longreach in time to get the car serviced. It was well overdue and we took advantage of having a Toyota dealer in town.