On The Road Again

Russ and I headed off on Friday 16th of April for around 7 months away. I hadn't planned to blog again, but several people suggested I should and I got as far as Morgan on the Murray River when I decided that I should too. I loved doing it previously and if you love reading it, please read on, if not, well, don't! I haven't started to take photos yet, but now I've begun, I promise I will!

We left home heading for South Australia on the Friday morning. I kissed my son, the house sitter goodbye, and drove off crying to be leaving him and the house. That lasted til we hit highway one (about 5 minutes)and I thought "we're on our way"! Another few tears after leaving Ryan and Kirstyn in Port Fairy and we really were on our way.

Night one was spent in Bordertown SA. The little town gets my vote as the friendliest place in Australia-so many smiles and hellos from townspeople as we took a walk around and did some shopping.

Day two we drove along the very flooded Murray on a gorgeous day. It broke both our hearts to have to drive on by when we saw what looked like half of SA's population out yabbying on the river. If only we'd known we'd have factored in extra time and stopped ourselves! We overnighted at the tiny and very historic town of Burra. We were lucky to get the last site in the only caravan park. After a nice walk around town, we enjoyed a lovely dinner of roast chicken with all the trimmings.

Sunday, we tossed up whether we should drive straight out to Crystal Brook and the highway or take the more scenic, windy road through the Southern Flinders Ranges and on to Port Augusta. It was a beautiful morning, so the more scenic route won. While lunching in a little place called Wilmington 44ks out of Port Augusta, we decided it was too pretty to move on. We found a great little bush caravan park and booked for two nights. It's $15 a night (due to the only shower being situated in a tent in the middle of the grounds) and 8 vans here in total. Funnily enough, 6 of us drive Nissans. We were invited by the rest of the "Nissan Club" to share their fire last night and while it was fun, it was the sort of pissing competition we really aren't into. All the crap about what modifications they've made to motors and clutches and brakes and springs and kilometers per litre and must-have long range fuel tanks several spare tyres and much more bores us witless. We service the car regularly, the wheels go round, we stop every few hours for fuel and we're happy. What's more it worked for over three years that way.

We'd been toying with the idea of a flight over Lake Eyre for the past couple of days and finally got word back from an air company who can get us on an hour flight. We'll stay Tuesday and Wednesday in Coober Pedy and drive out about two hours to William Creek where we'll meet the plane at 1 pm.