Day 17 Monday 3rd July

Charleville has the most amazing visitor centre. They have situated it out of the main part of town on the way to the airport. Built into the centre is a “Cosmos Centre” and weather observatory. As tourists pop into the information centre you can’t help but notice the interesting presentations that are put on in the Cosmos Centre. We booked into a “Solar Presentation” but wouldn’t you know it, it had rained very heavily all night and there was quite a bit of cloud cover in the morning. The lovely lady went ahead with the presentation and we were able to use the large telescope to view the sun. We were also presented with solar glasses for sun viewing too. The lady was not happy at the clarity of what we were viewing and so refused to charge us. Lucky us! They have a Cosmos Centre that has many interactive displays about space. They also run many night start gazing sessions using the many large telescopes they have in the observatory. In the afternoon, we had also booked into a tag-along-tour called “Top Secret WW11 tour”. We were told it was likely that this would go ahead despite the wet tracks that we would drive along. We really enjoyed this experience too. 3,500 US American airman and ground crews came to Charleville and were housed 101 buildings around the airport area. The US conducted the battle of the Coral Sea from here. The “top secret” aspect was the “Norden Bomb Sight”. This was the first mechanical device for accurate bombing and was mounted into the nose-cone of the B17s Flying Fortress. We visited the small concrete building where these were kept, guarded by soldiers and locked away. On the plans of the base it was listed as “The Dental Centre”. After this very interesting tour we visited the Royal Flying Doctors Museum which was also located in this area. Again it was a free museum which had great interactive information and children and adults alike enjoyed it. In the evening we went into town with Rick and Kerry and had dinner in a magnificent old pub called the “Crorones Hotel”. It was a large two storey pub with a huge bar and lots of history!






















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