Rubyvale, Qld 27July2022 465km

 Rubyvale, Qld 27July2022 465km

Straight out of Roma and heading north, dream run through to Injune and then on to Rolleston, another 170km away along the Gregory Goat track. Actually its not that its so bad, its just not that good and makes for a pretty tiring trip. Oh but wait, Road trains and roadworks, what a combo. Rolleston is known by all travellers as a tiny place to get some fuel and a coffee in the tiny Pioneer Park. We did the latter but calculated that Emerald was well within our range at 400km.

Back into the fray and joined the convoy of vans and trucks, all stopped at the stop / go roadwork light. Just get going again, but no its stop again. On and on. Finally we made it into Springsure, the trucks disappeared, the vans all stopped for lunch and we lit of for Emerald about 70km further. This bit of road is great and we slid into town in record time, about four-and-half-hours for the 400km. We fuelled up and wandered the rest of the way out west to Rubyvale a total of 465km for the day and 1600 plus kms in four days.

Enough already, I've run out of puff and my gout is playing up and I just want to stop and do nought for a while.

But first, a quick walk, as quick as my dodgy foot will take me, up to the Vienna Strudel shop for coffee and strudel. Just made it before closing and relaxed for a while. We were told in no uncertain terms that if we wanted to eat at the pub at anytime, we’d have to book, so we booked diner for Friday night. Judy seemed keen to get back to the van where happy-hour was threatening... fire-pit, snag-sizzle and country singer. Well I was expecting the yodelling to start any second, but he stuck to good-old country, or might be western, I have no idea, but is nasally enough to be either.

Thursday. Is it Thursday? Who knows. All I know is that we don't have to get up and go, which to me is just fine. Four days on the road is obviously enough for both of us these days. When we did finally get moving we moved the 600m down the street to the the Miners Cottage,  where one buys a bag of ‘wash’ and proceeds to fossick the lazy way, complete with Scones and Tea.

Lazyway fossicking 101. Judy taking instructions from the resident Emerald Expert

Going solo. Oh, here's one, into the cup it goes. The two piles are the coarse and the fine, from the sieves of the same name. Basically anything in the fines is too small to get excited about, but you just can't help looking for some 'colour'.

Miners Cottage 'gold' mine

The final was subject to scrutiny by the resident experts. Most are just colour, the odd few are 'polishers' and the vary rare one is a 'cutter'

After lunch we had a bit of a walk around town and ogled some of the gems on sale. Some are very nice, and very expensive. But that’s what gets you hooked, one day you might just turn up a big old chunk of sapphire.