Early Start, Like the moonrise last night we get to see the sunrise over these dead flat plains.
We hit the Road by 8, but we take a quick detour to look at the dam that’s here. No idea where it’s getting is water from.
About 30min later we pull into William Creek. I’ve read and seen TV stories about this little town. One bloke, Trevor Wright, seems to have brought up the whole place. As a pilot, he runs an aviation business out of here. All the flights up here, like Birdsville, Maree etc are all apparently serviced out of William Creek. We fill up the tanks, fuel is just getting more expensive (as expected) and buy a coffee from in the pub.
Across the road from the Pub, he’s got some kind of outdoor museum going, but the one I wanted to see was an old Rocket the British launched from Woomera.
We continue on. We pass the road to Coober Pedy, again so close, but a place I’m yet to visit.
There’s not a hell of a lot on this road, but we see up ahead the Algebuckina Bridge and Waterhole. We tack left to see the waterhole first, it’s huge. Really unexpected to see such a massive body of water out here.
Then over to the Bridge. There are heaps of old bridges for the old Ghan Line beside the Oodnadatta track, but this seems to be one of the biggest. We take a walk out on the bridge. The water hole seems to be on this side of the road too, so maybe the earlier diversion was not needed.
We pull into Oodnadatta, and then famous Pink Roadhouse. We fill the tanks (yet again) and go inside for lunch. I find my first Souvenir numberplate, Yay (don’t tell Justine!).
As it’s lunchtime, I can’t help but order a OodnaBurger (just a regular hamburger really), but it was pretty good.
Around 1 we hit the road once more. About 4 km out of town is a The Angle Pole. I believe it is one of the last original poles from the old Overland Telegraph that came this area before the roads.
George has pulled up about a K earlier, he’s heard some noise from his roof racks and on inspection, seems to have sheard a bolt off. They try a road side repair, but don’t have the ideal parts so we returned to Oodnadatta, only they don’t have the right size bolts either. At least here the guys can fix it in the shade of the roadhouse.
An hour later they’re done. These mechanical issues could happen to any of us, and it’s part of travelling on these roads, let’s hope that’s the worst that happens.
We continue on to Mt Dare but that’s over 200km, so we’re unsure how far we’ll get.
The roads are getting worse, and the roads are getting a bit harder to Navigate. Signage is not so clear and Google Maps has pretty much given up. On more that one occasion I’m doubting myself if we’re on the right track.
We have several maps, but they all are just a little different and show different roads. We got a mud map from the Pink Road House with some instructions, but the map is rubbish. I had printed off one from their web site a few weeks back and that’s seems slightly better to navigate by.
The track to Oddnadatta was sensational, so It’s hard to complain when the roads out here are pretty corrugated. We pass a couple of waterholes that seemed impressive, if we’d been thinking more clearly maybe we should have pulled up and camped at one of them, but we push on and finally make Mt Dare Hotel just after 6 as the sun is setting (at least we’re not heading west any more).
As the pumps are still open we fill up the tanks and all the Jerry Cans (@ $3.25/l…95.85ltrs ouch) and I get the LPG bottle filled. I ask the guy if the Eyre Creek closure earlier in the season had a impact, and he said they’d lost over 70% of their patronage over that period. So, a pretty big impact on them.
We make the only sensible call, which is to camp here the night. The place is pretty busy, so busy we need to preorder our dinner for 7:30. Enough time to get a basic camp setup, of course it’s dark now
Dinner is nice enough. After a drive like today, I have to have a beer.
We also organise our SA Desert Parks Pass, I could have ordered them online weeks ago, but I figured buying them here helps these guys a bit.
Finally, as we’re here a bore water shower as this will be the last one for a week, then bed. It was a huge day of driving.