Tuesdays turn to Wednesdays; Wednesdays to Thursdays, and so on – finally we got to Saturday and left Broken Hill.  The car was mended, some electrics worked, Trevor’s back was manageable, Lesley was accepting and we set our sights on catching up time by swiftly crossing South Australia to the west side of the Eyre Peninsular, self-contained camping all the way.  Will we run out of water, will the power fail?  What do you think?

Still, Broken Hill had given us more good moments.  Convalescence allowed a visit to the Royal Flying Doctor “Experience” which was great👍👍.  High point was an amateurish but charming reality video of the Skippy genre.  “What’s that Skip?  Billy has fallen of his quad bike and broken his leg…he’ll need rescuing…quick, into the plane”.  Billy turned out to be made of stern stuff but was afraid of needles!

Worse yet was some fool of an old grey nomad who had fallen down and broken his hip, so he had to be medivacced to Adelaide, leaving his long-suffering spouse to drive the van 900km to Adelaide by herself.  For reasons that made no sense to me, Lesley kept saying, “see, see”.

The girl wonder had also taken a 3 hour group walking tour of Broken Hill (I had coffee).  Tremendously instructive and entertaining, her guide kept meeting important people in the street and introducing his followers.  Next day, Lesley had her next Covid booster and the nurse asked what we’d been doing, so the walking tour got a mention. “Yeah, my dad was your guide” says all you need to know about country towns. So, while BH had plenty of down-and-out bits, we thought it was great.  We even fitted in a day trip to Menindee to see the lakes with plenty of water, so, not like Toledo at all.

Breaking for the border, we hurtled towards Port Augusta, stopping overnight at a bush camp called Catninga Park👍.  It was well and truly off-road, free-range camping but we found a decent spot (#6), had a great fire, a sausage sizzle on their built in bbq plate and were entranced by the elephant HWS and their “shower tree”.  Not sufficiently entranced to try them out, but the pictures show their excellence.

Having forsaken the Clare Valley (wine) and Coffin Bay (oysters) through lack of time, and avoiding Streaky Bay (too many caravans), Port Kenny became my focus.  It’s on Venus Bay which allegedly has “the best prawns in the world” and the local fish is King George whiting.  Everybody knows that’s as good as it gets, so we bypassed Whyalla (and its Telstra shop) on a Sunday and headed straight for our next carefully-selected bush camp, with visions of gorging on fresh seafood and a couple of days of R&R.  What could possibly go wrong?