About halfway between Emerald and Barcaldine are the small towns of Alpha and Jericho. The Iningai people are the traditional owners of the land in Barcaldine shire. We're camped in Alpha for a few days filling in a bit of time before catching up with friends a bit further west.
Alpha is very small and there's hardly anything here and is usually an overnight stop for nomads. But the caravan park is one of the best we've stayed at so we're happy to hang around here for a few days. Jericho's a bit further down the road and is smaller still, but counts among its two attractions one of the few remaining operational drive-in theatres in the country. Where they drive in from I have no idea, but once a month there's a double feature that's well enough attended to keep the theatre running.
But that's not why we went to Jericho today. There's a reasonably well known sculpture trail in a 200km triangle between Barcaldine, Jericho and another small town called Aramac. It's mostly dirt road but apparently worth doing all, or part of it. Along the way is Lake Dunn where you can see Brolgas dancing - kind of a bucket list thing for me - so I thought we'd head out and check out the section of the sculpture trail between Jericho and Aramac, which is about 77km of dirt road.
I called into the information centre in Jericho and picked up a map of sorts, with a list of all the sculptures that you can tick off as you pass them. I asked the nice woman behind the desk where I could get onto the Aramac road:
"Go all the way to the end of town..." (I could have thrown a rock from one end of the town to the other) "...you'll see a turn towards Barcaldine. Don't turn there. Go straight ahead."
Armed with our mud map and specific directions we headed off, being careful not to turn towards Barcaldine, and soon enough we were on the Aramac Road. After about 45 minutes of driving, we'd seen nothing but cows (Brahman cattle if you want to be exact) and thousands of termite mounds. No sculptures and certainly no Brolgas. It felt like we'd travelled far enough to see at least one sculpture and I started to think that maybe we were on the wrong road. How could that possibly happen?
Then that thought led to another, as thoughts do, and I realised that no one on the planet knew where we were. There was no mobile phone reception, no GPS and we hadn't seen another human since we left Jericho. Just cows and termite mounds. What if we broke down? Or worse, what if we hit a cow? I had plenty of water and a banana sandwich I was prepared to share with the Labs, but I didn't really want to see how long it'd be before the Labs started thinking about Brahman burgers.
I was starting to imagine the tyres deflating with every rock we drove over and decided that these would have to be pretty amazing sculptures to make up for the stress of finding them. So we turned around and headed back to Jericho and civilisation. Strangely enough, the trip seemed a lot shorter on the way back. And no cows jumped in front of the car. We made it back safely, checked out the drive-in theatre, and then headed back to Loretta for a cuppa and yet another entry in the Big Book of Lessons.
Great story Barb!