Days 23 - 26

 Day 23

We left Coober Pedy early as we decided we were going to drive pretty much the whole day to get to the Flinders Ranges. We had to drive the same way back as we had going there, as the other road to make it a round trip was closed due to flooding. There didn't seem much point at stopping at Lake Hart again, when there's not much to do there, it just made sense to make it a really long driving day instead. 

And it was long and boring. We did see this fella on the road though:

One thing did happen at breakfast before we left: A couple of children were having breakfast with their parents, and there were a lot of flies around. The boy saud "its getting a lot easier to swallow the flies, Mum!" and I thought that was very funny.

My fly swallow count: 4.

Our final stop was a place called Cradock Hotel where, if you bought a beer, you could camp out the back for free. We bought five beers (between us, not each 😉) and dinner, so it really wasn't that cheap in the end 😂😂

Beautiful sunset at Cradock

Day 24

First day in Flinders did not go quite as expected. I thought we'd be going some walks, but we accidentally chose driving trails rather than walking trails! We thought there'd probably be somewhere to park and get out, but not really. Anyway, our first stop was The Grest Wall of China. First, we saw The Grand Canyon at The Grampians, and now the Great Wall of China - who knew we'd be so international 😂 I thought this was something we could walk up to, but it was just a viewing area. The rocks really do look like a wall had been built along the top of the ridge though!

We then did a couple of 4WD tracks. Chris had fun driving them. I did not have much fun as the passenger. The scenery was beautiful though. Here are some pictures:

We then drove to what was to be our home for the next two nights: Mt Little Station. It was costing $25 per person per night, so at $100 for two nights, it was one of our more expensive camps. It's a working sheep and cattle station and as Chris said "how often are you going to get to camp in one of those?"

We rocked up to the house to check in and pay, where a young kelpie eyed us off suspiciously from the porch. We said hello and let her sniff us and then she seemed much happier and trotted off to play with a kangaroo leg. And by kangaroo leg, I mean an actual leg off of a kangaroo, tendons still attached so that the foot sort of flung around as she chewed the other end! Country dogs sure have it different!

We were given a pack of all these things we could do on this 24,000 acre property - hikes, walks, ruins, 4WD tracks - we had no idea there was so much to do there. We had plans for exploring the northern end of Flinders the following day, but decided we could just explore here instead. After two days of a lot of driving, it would be nice to not have to drive too much.

We made some dinner at the camp kitchen. It was raining at this point, and the rain was getting on the BBQ, so I had to cook whilst holding an umbrella! We had a shower and then went to our camp site called The Lazy Log and set up for bed.

I was hoping for some excellent stargazing but it was quite cloudy, so there really wasn't much to see, sadly.

Day 25

Chris had some computer work to do, so we had a fairly late start to our day of exploring. 

It's a different kind of office!

Trees in our camp

Lazy Log Camp

Our first stop on the property was Mayo Gorge, which was a lovely little walk along a stream, which led to a water hole. On a warmer day, it would have been great to jump in! 

The rocks were very interesting around here - so many different colours!

There were also some really impressive dry cracked earth patterns going on too.

We got back into the car and chose another walk to do from the map we'd been given, and chose Pirate's Cave. It looked like a small walk on the map, but it was a lot trickier in real life. There's lots of scrambling up rocks! We imagined that the treasure at the end would be a solar powered fridge with bottles of cold water in it! There was actually a treasure chest at the end, but it had 10c pieces in there. Not quite so exciting for us!

Chris made it to the cave!

The pirate waited a bit too long with his treasure!

We then pretty much did some more 4WD around the property, stopping at looking at ruins and a few other things. One was the Skull Tree, which had lots of animal skulls hanging from it. Chris is very keen to find a cow skull to attach to the front of the Jimny, but only one where "the ants have done their job." He doesn't want any flesh or anything on it! There was one really massive skull on the tree, which I was sure must be fake, but it wasn't. Chris thought it could be a horse, but later we saw camels and I reckon it's from one of them. (I have literally just googled it as I just remembered that's something I have the power to do 🙃 and can confirm it was a camel. Mystery solved!)

Chris choosing which skull to take (not really, he didn't take any. He wants to find his skull out in the wild...)

We then drove up Mt Little, which was a gnarly 4WD track. I got a bit seasick and didn't really enjoy it at all. This was the view from up the top:

The way down was just as bumpy, but definitely see heaps of kangaroos, which I always love.

There is a kangaroo in this picture, promise!

Once we got back to camp, we made some dinner, had a beer around a fire and it was a very nice end to a lovely day.

Day 26

At the very beginning of when we decided to do this lap around Australia, Chris ordered this table that was also a shelf for the Jimny. It finally arrived a couple of weeks after we started our trip 🙄 A big thank you to Steve who sent it onto a friend who has a shop in Adelaide where we could pick it up from. Thank you to Mark for holding onto it for us! We raced back from Flinders to get to the shop before it closed at 1pm. I was really sad to leave Flinders, as it felt like we'd only just scratched the surface and I would have loved to have stayed a couple more days.  We also had to get back to Adelaide for Chris to go to the football on Sunday (it's Saturday today). It's a special round called The Gather Round, where all the AFL teams come to Adelaide and play each other there. Mark told us that there was a Gather Round festival that you could go into where they had food stalls and entertainment and stuff. We didn't have much else to do that afternoon, so we headed over there, parking at the entertainment centre and taking the free tram the rest of the way.

It had rained quite a lot on our way down from Flinders, and it must have done here too-  this festival area was sodden and muddy! Still, everyone was in good spirits. We had some lunch, wandered around for a bit, and then headed back to our car with surprisingly clean feet.

We drove back to Mallala to stay for the night and sure enough, two people who we thought were living there were still there. It was VERY windy and cold there. Chris had some more computer work to do and I just went and hid in the swag, where it wasn't that much warmer, but at least I was out of the wind.