The past 7 days.....almost.....

Ok.....so we hit the dirt roads yet again and followed some seriously lonely paths, I think when people talk about "the middle of nowhere" that this road was what they were talking about. We finally touched down into South Australia into a beautiful little town called Wentworthville and after following the Darling river from its source in Bourke we found it's end where it joined the mighty Murray River. The waters from the two rivers were distinctly different in colour so we were able to watch as they came together to form the one single waterway.....it was pretty cool for sure! Our first night camping on the Murray River found us in a little tributary called Frenchmans Creek. This was the site of most of our first initiation of swimming in the river and we all found out the hard way just how COLD COLD COLD the water was!!! Steve & Pete were the first to go in and as the surfaced gasping for air we all knew it must be pretty cold but eventually (through tears, 500m Forest Gump sprints and an awful lot of psyching up) everyone had braved the waters and then spent the next hour huddled around a roaring fire talking up the whole experience!! The weather the following day had started to turn overcast so we packed up and headed further into SA stopping at Lake Victoria which had both a rich aboriginal history and some significant ties to the training of second world war aircraft pilots, two of which lost their lives by crashing into the lake in low visibility, their bodies and aircraft remain in the lake and a shrine to them takes pride of place from the viewing platform. We continued through the towns of Renmark and Waikerie (sampling the wears of the various bakeries along the way)& after a quick grocery restock and lunch down by the river at Waikerie where there were paddle-boats & 100's of houseboats, we caught the ferry across the river and set off to find a suitable campsite. After a lot of searching and having to cross back over the Murray once more we lucked upon a beautiful camp site in one of the state parks, got all set up and kicked back with a cold beer! The night was beautiful, stars out, moon shining so we thought everything was good to leave outside for the night......bad idea!!!! The weather changed overnight, the rain started and it poured, so we flew into action, packed everything and everyone up soaked through and hit out early. Food thing we did because the roads into the camp area had turned to mush, if we'd left it for much longer we'd have had a tough time getting out!! The Eastment/Teudt caravan continued to head south (once we'd dried out) through some very lonely but equally beautiful terrain. We travelled through the towns of Butra and Jamestown among many other little hamlets, stopped off at Banrock Station Winery to sample their wines (as you do when your wet, dirty and have a car full of wet/dirty/tired kids!!), needless to say we thought that we all deserved a couple of cases of red to help take the edge off the next few days!!! We now continued through the rolling hills, green pastoral lands & miles of vineyards down into the southern end of the Flinders Ranges where we wound our way down through some majestic passes and into Port Augusta......to be continued.......