Aussirose Travel and Photography: Ilfracombe & Barcaldiine

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ILFRACOMBE

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Blink, and you'll miss this quriky little town.

If travelling between Longreach and Barcaldiine, Ilfracombe is a good place to stop for a coffee, snack, beer or lunch. All bought at the Wellshot Hotel. There is plenty of roadside parking for vans so it makes for a good stop to stretch your legs.

The Wellshot Pub is well known for its strange bar stools, and of course we had to get the iconic photo here. 😃

Ifracombe is also home of the machinery mile which starts across the road from the Pub.

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BARCALDINE

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Barcy, as the locals call it, is the home of the birthplace of the Labour Party. In the main thoroughafair and adjacent to the railway station is the Tree-of-Knowledge depicting this. The tree is dead. That might say alot.

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This town is dying too. There are 4 pubs along this main street and not much more. There were a lot of businesses closed, including the pubs. We had a lovely cold ale on the verandah of the Shakespeare Pub and then when we went back the next day, it was closed, just like one others.

So we ended up at the Railway Hotel down the road which wasn't as nice.

The information centre was well presented, but the info lady was dissinterested and only opened up a bit when hubby pushed her on a couple of topics.

On the whole, we were disappointed with Barcaldine.

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DUNBLANE STATION CAMPING

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Not as good as our Station Camps in Western Australia.

Dunblane is a huge marino sheep station 8 k's from town.

We could not get the spot at the Woolshed which had mineral springs bath tubs outside under the stars. We were disappointed with this.

So I chose the Coolibah on Strip site because it had a photo of a van next to the billabong which looked nice. Unfortunately, that must have been an old photo as there is no way you could park that close to the waterhole. We had to be content to park in the middle of the dirt with no shade.

Still, it was nice to see the sheep, brolgas, a huge variety of bird life and roos that came down to the waterhole.

The sunrises, sunsets and milkyway were awesome too.

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LARA STATION WETLANDS

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It was here at Lara Wetlands, that we did experience our first dip in the outback hot mineral springs.

They only charge $10 per adult for a day pass which we found was good value.

We enjoyed our dips in the hot mineral spring pool along with an array of bird life surrounding the billabong. What we did was the best thing. Staying at Dunblane Station is not far out of town. Lara, on the other hand is a good 40 minutes out of town, 30 on the highway and another 10 driven on the fine red sand that gets into everything. Plus I would't go to Lara after rain. The dirt track will easily turn into a muddy bog.

So, even though we could not enjoy the hot springs at Dunblane, we really enjoyed our day trip to Lara Wetlands.