By mid morning we were feeling much better, packed up in the 35 degree heat and left at 10am. The area between Longreach and Winton was absolutely bone dry, with no signs that they'd had any of the rain we'd experienced earlier in the week.
We started planning our next trip which we decided would be a shorter one, when we go just to one or two destinations, but stay for longer. Cooktown came up in the conversation a lot; Steve has always wanted to live there and Laura absolutely loved it when we stopped briefly in our way to Cape York last year.
So we pretty much decided that we would go up for a week in a month's time and have a really good look around the town and the surrounding area.
We had been having numerous annoying issues with the Swift that would be good to get fixed up during its first service too, before we headed off again.
We were particularly experiencing issues with the pull out bed system which had never been a problem with the previous van, plus multiple less serious but annoying problems with the quality of the workmanship in the interior. We were confident however that everything would be sorted out for us by our friends at Jayco in time for our next journey.
There were a lot of dead Roos on this stretch of road too. We'd asked around and the general consensus was that the whole area is basically just the centre of Roo country, and the population is just immense, which translates to more road deaths. A lot of fellow campers in the last couple of years on various blogs had commented on how dangerous the driving was around Longreach, due to the Kangaroos, so we figured it was not a new problem. We never drive at dawn or dusk specifically for this reason.
About 80km before Winton there was a dramatic change and you could literally see a line where they'd had rain and plenty of it! The landscape was suddenly green and lush in total contrast to Longreach. It was almost like the rain had come all around it but totally missed it. What a shame.
Just before Winton, the Jump Up or Mesa came into view; an elevated rock formation with a flat top. The whole area is world renowned for Dinosaur remains and fossils and one of the richest areas is on top of this Jump Off. There are lots of other areas around and we are coming back to do the Dinosaur Trail properly another time. Sadly their Waltzing Matilda Centre was destroyed by fire in mid 2015 or we would've popped in.
Winton is a great little outback town and although it was mostly closed down for the blistering heat of the summer, it has a Film Festival and a Show in the cooler months (it was 38 degrees by now!). It has an open air theatre, sculpture wall, Banjo Paterson wrote Waltzing Matilda there ... Oh and the Bogong Moths love it too...!
Can't wait to go back for a proper look and visit all the Dino stuff!
We continued along the road, saying hello to some friendly cows on the way.
We got a visit from two gangly ridgeback cross puppies who jumped all over us, licking us to death. Spike and Sunshine stayed in relative safety under the table, away from the puppy antics, but Laura loved it!!
We were only 400km from home now and we resolved to come back again for a few days to really soak up the outback atmosphere.
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