TravellingStrom

Well, my brain was confused again this morning by the daylight savings. I woke up at the normal time but it was still dark 😦 So, I went back to sleep and slept a bit more, and of course it rained and was still raining when I woke up in daylight. I packed up as quickly as possible, wrapped up and got on the road and headed east.

One thing I have noticed in South Australia is these roadside markers.

The white ones are normal markers and it turns out the others mark accident scenes, the red ones are injured but survived, the black ones are fatalities. Every other state I have been to, they are usually marked by white crosses and wreathes, flowers etc. There are no extras that I saw at these scenes, I saw a lot of them today, but absolutely no sign of road kill, very strange, I wonder what caused them?

The weather started to clear and I had intermittent sunshine, it was still cold though.

I stopped for fuel at a place called Waliala, just 2 hours into the run and once again my credit card was rejected and used cash to pay for fuel. Lucky next door was a post office and a coffee shop, bought food and got on the phone to my bank. They checked my transactions and have no actual record of any attempt from those shops to get credit. It seems a bad phone connection will cause a rejection, but then you cannot try again for 3 minutes, for security purposes, of course they all tried straight away. At least I know now and can make them wait if it happens again. Nothing wrong with my credit or my card, but it has a crack in it from constant use 🙂

On I went and this is where I had decisions to make. I had lost half an hour and I wanted to get to Coober Pedy, but it was 11am and I still had 792km to go, which would mean I would get there on dark after a long cold day and do what? Pitch my tent underground and get up and leave and go over the same 540km I had just travelled? Nope, I decided I would have an easy day and just get to Port Augusta and maybe see what the weather was like. I felt a lot better once I decided not to ride all day at pace and an hour later passed through the town of Kimba where I saw Rachel and Greg at a fuel stop, I waved and went around the corner where I saw the giant Galah.

A quick snap and on again until nearing my destination I passed a rocky hill that was called Iron Knob, it looked heavily mined, maybe for iron?

I finally arrived in Port Augusta just after 1.30pm and found a caravan park near the river with nice views of the Flinders Ranges; they were just a name I had heard, now I see them 🙂

It was sunny and warm, crikey what a change so I did the washing and headed to a shopping centre to get some food and beer, before settling down to soak up some vitamin D and just relax for a change and actually finished a book. I chatted with the lady at reception while swapping some books and mentioned all the rain I had had, she said it never rains in Port Augusta 🙂

I had a pleasant afternoon doing bugger all, had a few beers, got ripped off on the parks internet, I will have to try and get my money back, but all in all had a good feed and although it got colder later on, I now had clean clothes and lots of them 🙂 I stayed up getting up to date on the laptop.

Day – 480km
Trip – 17,491km

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