Tues 30th Aug 2011
We had a nice evening with Dee and Mick Monday night, was
lovely to catch up, was hard to believe Mick had been in Alice Springs for a year, life is going too quickly!!
We set off a bit later than we wanted to this morning, was just before 8am, but we had a good run through to Coober Pedy, stopped in a free camping spot 12km south of Coober Pedy around 5ish.
It was my fault, I found what I thought was a lovely flat white spot!! Mmm the white spot was really dusty (very dry Coober Pedy clay dust!!), and I suffered with bad hayfever!! I am glad we didn’t begin our journey at this spot and went the other way around the West Coast. I had envisioned a lot of our trip would be staying in dusty places that took forever to get to, just like this one. As it turns out this was the only one of our trip and I think if we had parked a few more metres from the spot we were on it would have been much better!!
So not only do we have to look up when we park the van (for Green ants nests) we also have to look down at what we are parking on!!
Anyway this god forsaken place was not quite as bad as all that, in the middle of the outback on a very dusty spot was the most
magnificent sunset of our holiday, the colours were so rich, was stunning. 🙂
Wed 31st Aug 2011
As we were pulling out of Coober Pedy around 8am no doubt!! We had another system engine failure – can’t remember what it was called but this time, the car was telling us we were going to be travelling 60km an hour till the problem was fixed!! Mmm Not happy Jan!!! Anyhow after we rang roadside assist a few times, with our limited mobile access and turned the car on/off a few times the warning message disappeared, much to our relief – it would have taken forever 😛 at 60km/hr to get home!!
This didn’t take too long and we were soon on the road 🙂
We had another good run today, stopped for lunch overlooking
a beautiful salt lake – I think the country 200km around Port Augusta is very beautiful. We pulled into Port Augusta around
2.30pm, we were going to stop there the night but thought we could drive a bit further, so we (Greg) drove to Clare. Because we
went the scenic route, the road an hour out of Clare was rather windy (lots of bends and curves sort of windy) – glad I wasn’t driving!! I am pretty sure it was the
windiest bit of road of our whole trip – the roads were generally long and straight, which was helpful being our first trip with the van!!
We had a lovely night in Clare – got there around 5pm, after
we set up we went to the Sevenhills pub, the food was sensational (we will be back) Was very cold in Clare, got down to 3 degrees – my bones already miss the warm!
Thurs 1st Sept 2011
The country is very beautiful around Clare – we decided it was a lovely detour on the way home. Hopefully we can come back sometime in the next year for a few days with the van and visit some wineries 🙂
So true to form we left Clare just after 8am 🙂 Was a really lovely drive home, for most of the way, then it slowly became built up, there were lots of roads showing on our GPS, lots of cars and before you knew it we were back into our previous reality!! That was really hard for Greg, he wanted to do a U turn and keep going in another direction!!
We arrived home 2 hours later just after 10am to a beautiful
Adelaide spring day.
I can’t believe how enjoyable this holiday has been, it has been relaxing and fun. We have seen some beautiful country, met nice people and have many beautiful memories (and many thousands of photos!!) of this gorgeous country we are lucky to live in.
We have driven 14000 km (well Greg did drive most of it, I only contributed on the long days of driving) and flown 6000 km in 8 weeks and I wouldn’t have missed a moment. I love caravanning and can’t wait for our next adventure!
Thanks for sharing our adventures with us and for your love and comments along the way xo 🙂
(we will post some photos in the next few days)
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