Aussirose Travel and Photography: Longreach

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LONGREACH

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First impressions of Longreach? Tiny outback town just like any other that we have been to, except, these guys 'charge' like wounded bulls.

We picked up a brochure of things to do and it seemed like a lot, most of it all about the old outback pioneer days and stockmen, oh and of course the Qantas Museum that celebrates the birth of Qantas here in Longreach. Every single tour to me was too expensive!

We spoke to three ladies in the main street who came to Longreach by train especially for the outback Opera. Yes, we had missed all the good stuff on our trip like Rodeos and local shows etc. But what do we get? Yep, opera.

😏

Anyway, the 3 ladies had done Everything! I mean Everything!

They banged on about the museum and staying at the fabulous 'Stables' across the road and doing the dinner cruise and show that we were about to do, as well as the Cobb & Co horse & buggy tour and the Stockmans Hall of Fame.

Yep, they would have gone through a pretty penny.

Longreach, short for suck. Money suck.

😂

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MUDDY DUCK TOURIST PARK

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I chose this park off the back of a recommendation from someone that we had met at the Roadhouse Caravan Park in Winton. I was considering both the Muddy Duck and the small caravan park in town that has daily smokos which sounded interesting.

I think I should probably have chosen the smaller one in town. Muddy Duck is located out of town a bit and on the big Thompson River. It is the newest park in the area and from what we saw, popular. The park seemed to be nearly full every night.

Perhaps that was because of it being new. Perhaps it was because of its new facilities. Maybe it is because every site is drive through and level. Whow knows? I certainly could not give the Muddy Duck a 5 star review on Google. I think around 3 stars is appropriate.

The reasons why is, it is about 5 minutes drive out of town, to me it felt cold and inpersonal and without charactor. We were given strict instructions to drive in and park on the right hand side of the site. Being that there were long lines of drive in sites, if you had one way down the back, you had to walk a long distance to get to the facilities. It was lacking in bins & washing lines, it had just one big skip bin out the front, and there was no dump point.

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OUTBACK PIONEERS

DINNER CRUISE & SHOW

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I had chosen to do this quite a while back. Due to our strict budget we have to be careful what things we lash out on. I wanted to do the little silver train experience to the dinner show run by another company, but that one was booked out.

I am glad that we could get onto this one. As I said before, Winton & Longreach were suddenly busy due to the Outback Opera.

Anyway, it was well done. There were a few of us at the Apex Park which is near the caravan park. Actually that is a good free park to stay at, but I had to work so we didn't free camp here. The Apex Park is quite near the Outback Pioneers Dinner site so we were the last to get picked up and the first off the bus.

We arrived at the site and boarded the paddlesteamer for our trip up Thompson River. It was nice and peaceful and the sunset was glorious. They sold soft drink if you wanted that, but it was also BYO and everyone brought their choice of bevvy. They had commentary which was good. The last paddlesteamer cruise we went on up the Murray did not have any commentary.

Back at the dinner site, we all had stockmans stew which sort of tasted like it came out of a can, along with a good dollop of mash. There was apple pie and custard for afters and at the end, we had damper made in camp ovens over the fire coals.

The show was good with a lady doing bush poetry (not as good as Gregory North at the caravan park at Winton). Then we all walked down to a movie screen on the river for a little stockman movie.

All in all, it was a good night and executed like clockwork.