We settled on three days.
My husband had to be talked up gradually, from one, to two and finally to three days. Broken Hill, I had been reliably informed was a place with much to see and much to do. Perhaps even three days wouldn’t cut it.
And so having booked four nights accommodation and organised other accommodation enroute, we Skyped my daughter to tell her our travel plans. It hadn’t occurred to me to ask the most seasoned traveller in the family about Broken Hill. She’s been to Paris, Rome, Chicago, Berlin, Greece, Turkey, China, New York, London and most places in between. I assumed that Broken Hill had slipped between the cracks (pun intended). But of course the girl who has seen the northern lights has also been there.
I remember now. The last time she went hurtling off to places unknown (most recently Latvia), she thought she should see Australia first and so did a quick week fly-in fly-out visit of most of our key places. Perth, Sydney, Cairns, Adelaide are all ticked and crossed off her must-see-everything-before-I’m-30 check list. Somehow, Broken Hill got fitted in as well.
She scoffed when I told her we were booked to stay there for four nights. After all, she’s seen Paris in less than that. Her words were something like: “How long can you look at a pile of dirt in the desert?”
It’s true, said pile of dirt is one of the big attractions and while she might demean the experience, my friends tell me this is the place to sit atop at sunset, watching the sun go down on a unique Australian landscape. In fact, there are a number of places to see spectacular sunsets and luckily for us, we will have enough nights to go to them all.
I didn’t want to put a kybosh on the whole experience so I told her not to tell her thoughts to her father. She faithfully reported to him the idle joy in sipping a milkshake at the Broken Hill milk bar and hanging out at the pub where Queen of the Desert was filmed. My husband seemed unusually buoyed by the idea of the pub. I felt better at seeing his eyes light up at the thought of a beer at an outback location. Perhaps he could even take one to the top of the pile of dirt.
- Linda Muller
