Another glorious morning waking up in Mt Remarkable NP - refreshingly cool - but just waking up in this beautiful bush land setting is heaven.
We had ourselves a nice relaxing breakfast of porridge this morning and then packed up and headed for Port Augusta to do some shopping at the supermarket before heading for the little township of Quorn - our stepping stone into the Flinders Ranges NP further north of here.
We said goodbye to Mt Remarkable NP - and the great Mambray Creek campground
We did not see much of Port Augusta really as it is a biggish place (with a population of around 17000) that we were not really prepared to try and negotiate our way around.
One interesting fact about Port Augusta is its water supply comes mainly via a pipeline all the way from the Murray River. The laying of this pipeline assisted greatly with the growth of this city as it has always struggled for a good permanent water supply.
These days with 2x huge power generating stations it supplies 40% of SA electricity requirements.
It is also known as the "Crossroads of the Outback" with it being a hub to places both east and wets of here as well as North and South.
But we can't see everything - there is just not enough time and we prefer to be out of the bigger towns and in the countryside, the bush and the outback areas where we see a different lifestyle to the city life we lead.
We actually succumbed or a MacDonalds lunch on the way out of town as they have free wifi and I was trying to maximise my opportunity to upload some more of this blog.
After we turned off the highway, heading for Quorn, we quickly started winding our way through the foothills of the Flinders Ranges.
We drove into Quorn at about 1.30pm - checked into the caravan park and went off to do a quick look around the town. This is a great caravan park where the owner/managers of some10 years now have apparently taken it from a desolate 10 acres to a park with lots of bushes and 'arid happy' foliage. They tell us it is still a work in progress and they are doing everything without any fertilisers and poor quality water (the water comes from a council bore just out of town and is high in calcium and such minerals which is not great for growing plants). They also have quite a lot of River Red Gums that suck up a lot of any moisture in the ground.
We had the "Sydney Opera House" style going with the sail awning today as you can see in this photo of our little "humpy"
And here we have a photo of the 'Quorn Wattle' - there is lots of this bush growing around the caravan park.
This afternoon I started our cook up of meals for a trip across the Simpson Desert. We are cooking and freezing meals so that we do not have too much rubbish to carry with us and we have next to no preparation for our nightly meals. It will simplify things for us heaps.
Thanx for the idea Cindy - it worked well for us on the trip over form Brisbane to SA as we did not need to cook at all on our overnight stops after a day of lots of driving.
The reason we came to this caravan park is because I had checked out a couple of places and this one had a good camp kitchen and a full size fridge/freezer that maximised our chance of being able to freeze our prepared meals and also meat we have bought today. Freezing it like this works really well and then the our freezer section of the Evacool fridge does the job keeping it frozen relatively easily without having it work too hard.
It turned out to be warmer evening than we had previously been having in our last few campsites. So the warmer coverings were getting thrown off last night.
I would love to walk to the summit of what they call the Dutchmans Stern tomorrow - but will have to see how the weather pans out as it has got quite overcast tonight - hence it being warmer.
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