Since there were no showers at the free campsite, we asked the swimming pool if we could pay to use theirs. It seems they must get it a lot, as he answered '$2.50' pretty quickly and without any thought.

The dinosaur footprints we had heard about were actually in Winton, another 2 hours drive away, so we just went to the Stockman's Hall of Fame and Heritage Centre. It was very informative, with a video and 5 galleries, and we paid to see the optional stockman show. The guy doing it had a lot of jokes up his sleeve- there was a plastic snake on the ground which the horse picked up with his mouth and threw away, he had trained the horse to keep taking off the saddle blanket off himself and there was a sketch where he got a member of the audience to help him carry the present he had got for his mother in law. When they put the table down, he turned round and the table toppled over, so that 3 little pigs escaped the present box. He whistled for 'Jonny' to come out- a stuffed toy riding on the back of a dog to round them up. He also told us how to break in a horse for rounding up cattle- i.e. teaching them how to stop, turn left and right, etc and other things involved in being a stockman. Occasionally he played the odd country song, his guitar amplifier kept cutting out which, to me, highlighted that you didn't really need to be able to sing to be a country singer.

I had gone to Longreach quite naively- I didn't really know what the outback was. I certainly didn't realised they were pretty much Australian cowboys and that they hired aboriginals to help them- I had assumed they would be quite racist and 'redneck'. I also hadn't heard of 'The Flying Doctors' before but it sounds like a great idea. The part I liked best in the gallery was the theatre you walked in where a projector was focused on a mannequin making it look like he was talking, to imitate the camp driver (I think that's what the lead stockman is called) telling you his stories around the campfire.

After that we went onto the next town Ilfracombe. We stopped off in the Wellshot hotel for a pasito (passion fruit flavour fizzy drink) because it was an 'original 19th century pub which is one of the few in Queensland still trading today'. There was an emu picking at the grass opposite, and the guy looking after the pub whilst the owner was on her honeymoon showed us the one in the back yard. The dog took a shining to Alice (as did Alice take a shining to the dog) because she would actually throw the bottle top he kept bringing to us for him. We also had a look at Lagenbaker house (which was 110 years old) and went to the Wellshot centre, which was about the largest sheep station, but wasn't very good because the power was out so you couldn't watch the film, and I'd had enough of reading information from the Hall of Fame!

Along the drive to Emerald (where the lady at the Longreach information centre told us there was a free campsite), there's a river called Alice river, so we stopped off for a photo.

Once in Emerald, Alice wanted to use McDonalds Wife, which took a while to find and which didn't work once we were there.