Big things road trip day nine - Charters Towers to Rubyvale

Emma
Jan 2, 2021
2 min read

Today was another big day of driving!

There is not too much to see, apart from quite a bit of roadkill, on the highway between Charters Towers and Rubyvale. Once we pulled onto the highway our GPS told us to "continue straight for 4 hours and 58 minutes". Make sure you leave Charters Towers with a full tank of fuel and a packed lunch as there is only one rest stop about halfway.

We arrived in Rubyvale around 3pm and headed straight to Miners Heritage to try our luck on getting a spot on the last underground mine tour of the day. Luckily, we made it just in time and even better there was no one else on this tour so Noel and I got a private 45 minute tour to check out the mine! It was pretty cool to see and even cooler once we discovered that it had mostly been dug by hand!

It was a super hot day so after finishing up at Miners Heritage we checked into our accommodation for the night at the Rubyvale Motel where we enjoyed a long swim to cool off. We were lucky enough to be given an upgrade to the one-bedroom apartment. Right outside our room, there were a number of wallabies and a couple of them had babies in their pouches. I had a stack of fruit and the owner told me that they loved bananas so I spent about an hour trying to coax them closer with treats - it worked!

We went to the local hotel for dinner, as it seemed like the only option in town for this.

The motel we were staying at had an observatory and we had booked in an astronomy tour, so we returned to our motel around 7 pm so we could be on time for this. We were again lucky enough to be the only ones booked in for this so we got a private 90 minute tour of the night sky and got to use the big telescope to look at a bunch of planets and the moon.