Day 76/77: 3rd and 4th September. Middle of a sheep paddock again. Spear Creek \ Port Augusta.

Long drive day of around 6 hours of actual driving. Stopped for lunch at Woomera, which is Australia’s Cape Canaveral. Interesting history of rocket launches, a good museum and actual artefacts in a display on the street. Rolls Royce engines that have been trashed landing back on earth make for a good viewing spectacle. Woomera is also a RAAF town. It is organised with housing, wide streets, central facilities and nobody there. It was like a well maintained ghost town. It does go to show that you can have towns that are nicely organised in the middle of nowhere if the government decides it is a priority.

Spear Creek is just out of Port Augusta, keeping with our theme of staying just out of town. This time, it is about 20ks out of town and 15ks are on a road that while sealed, made corrugated iron look flat. A very slow last 10ks after a long time on the road was a bit frustrating. The camp though has bookended our trip well. Our camp in Spear Creek is a working sheep farm that we stayed in the middle of, just like The Dish in Parkes is in the middle of a sheep paddock. They run Dorper sheep which do not need shearing, and taste a little different to our normal lamb. Verified fact.

Instead of a neatly laid out caravan park, we have our own space to set up in. The important feature they did have was the camp kitchen with a tv connected via satellite so that I could watch the bulldogs final that night. If I couldn’t have seen it, I would have been quite on edge about the game. As it turned out, I was on edge anyway. Even with the loss, it was good to watch the game with one other person, under cover and on a good sized telly.

Port Augusta is an industrial town with not much to see or do, so the camp site was a really good call. A couple of hours in town at the supermarket was enough, with the highlights being running into a couple from Tassie we had seen at three other places and spotting a caravan called an Alto, which is Linda’s dream set up. Other than that, the campsite and it’s scenery of the Flinders Ranges and a farm of Windmills were the sights to see.