Winton

It was with some trepidation that we headed off to Winton, as I had memories of a not very nice caravan park on our trip last year, and the other parks didn't get much better comments on the trusty Wikicamps.

In the end we stayed at the Tattersalls pub park. As is so often the case, we had a much better stay than expected. Our site fees included a free drink with each main meal bought at the pub, and there was a great saxophonist playing every night - AND I won a $10 meal voucher the first night in a Scouts raffle. I was glad we were on a site as far away from the pub as possible, as it may have been noisy at night.  The water in Winton really does stink of sulphur though, which is not fun when cleaning your teeth.

Winton was the start of our dinosaur trail experience, and we learned that in this area, the level nearest the surface is the 95 million year old layer, with Australia's large plant-eating sauropod dinosaurs, medium sized carnivores such as Banjo, small plant eating ornithopods and chicken-sized coelurosaurs.

We opted for a bus tour to Lark Quarry, as it was over a hundred kilometres of dirt road each way.  Vicki from Red Dirt Tours was an awesome guide. We stopped for morning tea at Merton gorge - what glorious scenery!

Then on to Lark Quarry, with salads for lunch before a tour of the dinosaur stampede footprints.

 Hundreds of small dinosaurs, and one big one! How mind-bending to think you are looking at footprints made 95 million years ago. They really looked as if they had been made yesterday.

The following day we went out to the fabulous Australian Age of Dinosaurs museum.

A tour in 3 parts, we saw the fossil preparation area,

the display of specimens,

and the brand new dinosaur canyon, which was a very picturesque display of bronze statues on the edge of the jump-up (mesa). They are also developing a cycad valley with living cycads and other ancient remnant plant species.

It was a wonderful visit, even though the 3 hour tour didn't allow time for lunch, and the cafe was depleted by the time we finished.

We found time to check out the local boulder opal - lovely - and were pleased to catch up with a couple that had been on our sapphire tag-along tour back in Anakie.  So I left Winton feeling very much more positive about it and keen to return for the next stage of the Age of Dinosaurs museum.