20/092021 Out of the Wind: Flinders Ranges to Port Augusta

-

I haven't worked for two Tuesdays in order to facilitate the Great Border Dash Detour, but all good things must come to an end and I have to virtually front up tomorrow and earn my keep.  With this in mind we reluctantly left the Flinders Ranges and headed back down the hill to Port Augusta.

Before we left we went for one last walk to the old Solar Power Station.  This may have been a very exciting thing to see back in 1998 when  it was built, but it lacks a little pizazz now, given the increase in number and size of solar power stations in the intervening 23 years.  Despite the underwhelming point of interest, the Flinders turned on a moody, cloudy morning with lots of wildflowers and a freezing wind to make the walk memorable.

From our caravan park cabin we can wander down to the 'shore' and look across the gulf to long lines of rolling stock with the southern Flinders Ranges in the background.  We went for a short walk but the weather, having considerately waited until we were booked into a cabin, is violently windy and cold. In fact, the wind blew so violently into the Port Augusta Woolworths store that it affected the ability of the self-service scales to calculate whether the goods had been placed in the bags, thereby exasperating the attendant who spent the whole day resetting the complaining systems. We soon gave up on the whole walk shenanigans and took ourselves back to our cosy cabin, very content to not be in a tent tonight.

Freight trains across the water, with the Flinders in the background.


I'm freezing.  Can we stop now and go back inside?


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

23/12/21 The Dinosaurs of Newtown

-
Image
Some time in the months before Christmas, somewhere near Newtown, a shop had a sale of inflatable Christmas dinosaurs. Lots of people thought that a large inflatable dinosaur was just what they needed for their 2021 outdoor festive decor, so they bought the dinosaurs and then discovered that, once inflated, they were very big. Not as big as a real dinosaur would have been, obviously, but certainly big enough to be inconvenient if you happen to live in a trendy little terrace house with a handkerchief of front lawn and second story verandah almost the size of half a vegemite sandwich.   Dinosaur #1: taking up all the available verandah space I imagine that at this stage the dinosaur purchasers may have considered the size of the dinosaur (inflated or otherwise) in relation to their rubbish bin, but were likely prevented from this course of action by children who, enamoured of dinosaurs, had welcomed the creature into the Christmas fold and called it something festive like Rudolph, o...
Read more

Minor Adventures on Quiet Days

-
Image
 Roger took himself off on the train to South Australia for a week, so BD and I decided to have some adventures of our own, albeit not as exciting as riding the interstate train to Adelaide and getting to have an up-close stickybeak at the flooded Murray River. We took ourselves off to the Ormond Lookout to watch the sun set instead. As did rather more people than what we had anticipated. Mobs, in fact. We found a patch of dirt grass and settled in.  "I'm gonna come back here!" declared BD.  She wriggled around a bit: our patch of grass was on quite a slope and she kept sliding out of her shorts.  "With a chair," she added. In between admiring other people's dogs and taking observational lessons in 101 Ways To Take A Selfie, we watched the sun trundle slowly toward the horizon. No sunset is complete without a picnic. There she goes. Further down the beach, a container ship puttered across the horizon under the gaze of a lone beach-sitter.  And us, of course...
Read more

Quiet Life with Cat

-
Image
 After all the excitement of hospital stays, Emergency Department visits, and trying to balance the cost-benefit ratio of hospital cafeteria food, life became a little more settled.  After a week of blessedly boring drug levels BD was given a reprieve from daily blood tests and we, therefore, were released from daily drives to the nearest Melbourne Pathology lab.  We did some laundry and did some cleaning and I hopped on my bicycle and went for a ride or two.  Not that the weather was very conducive to enjoyable and relaxing bike riding, but I went anyway. All was fine at Albert Park, where the swans put on a good show, playing happy families all across the playing fields.  But that didn't last for long. Back at home the new cat let his crazy out to play.  He zoomed up and down the hallway in the middle of the night; scared the bejeebers out of us by jumping on the sound bar and blasting us with high volume TV; hid under chairs and batted at our ankles as w...
Read more