“Home” in Port Augusta

 Waikerie

We had just over 400 kms to drive today so we didn’t delay leaving Renmark.  The road initially followed the Murray River and then we took a side road to Waikeria where there is a vehicle ferry over the Murray.  Surprisingly the ferry runs on demand 24 hours per day and is free of charge.  There were a number of houseboats moored along the river bank and it appeared that the area is a popular holiday spot.  A short drive from Waikeria, with citrus orchards and vineyards lining the road, we reached Cadell which again had a ferry crossing the Murray.  This ferry had a woman operator.

The ferry is free

The road continued to Burra which is a very old small town and then to Spalding, which advertised a road house but that had been closed up for some time.  Soon we saw the first sign post with Port Augusta on it – it was a welcome sign.  We also saw that there were sign posts to Broken Hill – that road was the road we had initially planned to travel.  We were surprised that there were no signs advising that the road was closed just 50 kms up the road due to the collapse of the bridge at Yunto.

We stopped off at Crystal Brook for lunch – this is a small rural town and was quite busy today being a Monday and just on midday when we visited.  From here the road soon joined the main highway from Adelaide to Port Augusta – a road Peter has now travelled at least five times!  After our unplanned lengthy stay in Port Augusta in November our arrival certainly had some feeling of “arriving home”.

We had contacted Alan from the Storage facility and he was waiting to meet us at 2.15 pm.  The caravan looked none the worse for its long stay out in the sunshine and we were soon hooked up and have now booked into the caravan park where we stayed for three weeks in November.  We spent the rest of the afternoon repacking the car and caravan, grocery shopping etc we are now ready to head off again tomorrow.

Runs 24-7

 Taken from the Ferry

Not a bad lifestyle back and forth

 Mmmm should we just give them a little shunt

Cadell ferry number 2 for the day

Free again

Could we just take a run at it

See what we did most today apart from drive zillions of miles

Another ferry driver doing the bit of a backwards and
forwards and backwards and forwards thingy

And last but by no means least the
Nissan and the Van finally reunited again