We picked up our first Road Train (RT for short although depending on where they operate they can be over 50m long) outside of Roma and as I haven't overtaken anything on the open road for, oh, probably about 30 years, we followed it a fair way. I was glad of that too when we came across the cows ... a huge herd of them "crossing" the road according to the sign, but actually wandering all over it and along "The Long Paddock". Had we not been following the RT, we would still have been sitting there waiting for them to finish their meandering ... but we followed him as he drove slowly through the mob. This to me is the stuff of nightmares - in Billi Stanley going through cows almost taller us.
There was a chuckle out of the experience though ... one of us opined: "I think that cow's pregnant." The other of us commented: "It's a bull!". I think this shows we are city-slickers especially given how excited we were to see these magnificent beasts up close - and so many of them.
Next stop ... Mitchell ... once home to M and her family where they ran the Courthouse Hotel (now known as the Historic Courthouse Hotel) and where Mouse physically ejected the first (and last) troublemaker. It must have been truly amazing for M and Ka ... arriving in Mitchell from Europe ... with miles of nothing all around. It would have been different then too.
The other reasons for our stop, besides to have a look at the Courthouse Hotel ... which has only just re-opened a couple of days ago (it has been through various iterations since Mouse was there) - and which was so much smaller than either Sooz or I had thought ... was to visit The Great Artesian Spa. One of the tourist sites describes it thus: A soak in the thermal mineralised artesian waters is relaxing for the body and therapeutic for the soul. Sooz was looking forward to it and wasted no time getting changed into her cossies and jumping in. She was the second person in - quite uncharacteristic said the woman running the spa, as it's usually quite full of folk - especially in the Winter months when the Grey Nomads (since dubbed "Gromads" by Sooz) come north to escape the Great Southern Winter.
We managed to tear ourselves away from Mitchell (d'oh ... leaving the dog pooh safely scraped away on the grass before I climbed back into Billi Stanley) late morning and headed towards Morven ... home of the Miniature Museum ... which (and who knew) is only open Monday-Friday. That made it a relatively short visit in Morven ... there is not a huge lot to see there ... and we pushed on to Charleville ... and lunch at Hotel Corones - making it there with 5 minutes to spare before the dining room closed. Phew!
We had tickets to the Cosmo Centre ... Charleville's Observatory for tonight ... and arrived at 7:15 to join Damon and his grandparents and about 30 other folk. It seemed to be about the busiest place in town.
It was a great night ... from the moment they shephered us out of the main building out the back, where we took our seats in the shed - and then, to the strains of 2001 A Space Odyssey music, the roof rolled away to reveal the moons, stars and planets above. We were lucky ... it was a cloudless night and the moon was waxing gibbous (or something like that) halfway between new and full - so it wasn't flooding the sky with too much light.
Damon had woken his grandparents that morning with a rendition of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star - his favourite for evening as well when he usually tows his Pa out to the backyard so they can both look at the stars as he sang. Then he would be fine to go to bed.
On the viewing agenda for the night Alpha Centurai (destination of the Robinson Family who then became famous for being Lost In Space) - actually a binary star "system" visible even though there are three stars visible in that part of space; Antares - the red star in Scorpio; the Jewel Box - so called because of the different colours of the stars there. Stars are different colours depending on the stage of their life cycle - and how hot they are. Blue is the youngest/hottest, followed by yellow and red. Our star (the Sun) is apparently yellow - regardless of how it's portrayed on the Japanese flag - even though there is a reason for that (which escapes me at the moment).
Also on the viewing list - the Moon - and the craters were amazing! ... and Jupiter and Saturn. The last two were a bit of a disappointment - but only because we had seen them so clearly - through a much stronger telescope when we visited Dubbo a few years back (on the Solar System Tour). Tonight, Jupiter and Saturn looked like white cardboard cut-outs ... and I'm sure Damon would have loved them had he not been asleep!
The session finished just around 9 and we decided before we left there that there probably wouldn't be much on offer in the way of eats in Charleville that long after dark (we had checked before we left the cabin) and we called into the Gull Truck Shop - near the airport - to see what they had on offer. Alas, any fresh food they may have had was long gone and Sooz settled on a box of Weet Bix and I got some cup noodles ... thank goodness we'd had lunch.
Sooz's main thoughts were not on food though ... she had developed a rash on her hands and she started thinking that she was suffering a reaction to the Artesian Spa. Let's hope she has some antihistamine with her in case it gets worse - or that we can find a chemist somewhere in the Outback!
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