Today was day 12 and the last day of our trip ☹ We headed for Longreach which is one of the biggest outback towns and is well known. Our first stop was the Longreach School of Distance Education. This school is double the size of New York State… virtually. The students all live too far away from schools so they go to school from their homes and tune into radios, telephones, or webcams for class. The teachers work out of the actual school building and hold 45 minute sessions with their students online or over the radio/ phone. A couple of times a year all the students actually go to the school and stay there for a weeks time. During this time the students would have a more normal school day with other students and a teacher in the same classroom. This is also when they get to bring in and show their unit projects they have been working on. It was interesting to see how kids from so far away could still “attend” a specific school even when they lived in the middle of nowhere.
Next we went to the Stockman’s Hall of Fame. We watched a cattle show, and sheep dogs round up the sheep. We got to see how cattle used to carry logs for farmers, and how long it took to transport just one log. There were also girls performing how to crack whips. After we got to walk the streets and go into different stores along the strip. All the stores sold were different cowboy and country things. We than went to this older couples house who owned and lived on the Longway Cattle Station. It was 40,000 acres of land and thousands of cattle. It is one of the oldest and biggest stations in the outback. The house was huge, and so beautiful with a lot of original features. They had gotten a lot of their original cattle from the King Ranch Station in Texas!
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