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At last we are leaving the Outback! WOOHOO!!!!
Heading south from Coober Pedy we had 550km drive to Port Augusta which is called the Crossroads of Australia, basically because once you get here you either head West to Perth, South to Adelaide, East to Sydney or North to the Outback. Our plan was to head west to Perth but we thought we'd take a couple of days to relax first as we'd basically done nothing but drive for the past 3 weeks!
On the way south though we hit a little snag in the form of a run in with the local coppers!!! Driving down the only road towards South Australia, through a small town called "Pimba" we suddenly had the coppers behind us who pulled us over and started accusing us of having a rader jammer installed in the camper?!? They tried to blame to the TomTom but eventually conceded it wasn't that but still insisting on searching the camper for a jammer. Guess what? Nothing, so we went on our way again.
Port Augusta is really small town with nothing to see, so all we did was spend the day there to stock up on food and water ready to head to Perth the next day. But, when we did set of to Perth we quickly changed our mind..... We'd only been going 20-30km towards Perth when we got to the straightest road you can imagine when our hearts sank and we realized we just didn't want to do this again. It was going to take us 5 days of solid driving and 2200km just to get to Perth and would cost us in the region of $1600 just in petrol so we decided it just wasn't worth it. We don't plan on settling there anyway, perhaps if the visa was already through we might have gone, but as its not yet we thought we save the money and enjoy what we had left.
So a quick doughnut at a random town called "Iron Knob" to turn around and we headed back and south towards Adelaide. On the way we went through a mother of a rain storm which didn't stop for 24hrs, so we had a very soggy first night in Adelaide when we eventually got there. My god its cold in Adelaide!!!!!
Before we came traveling we thought we would stay in Adelaide for a while, but once you get here you realize there really isn't that much to do. Plus is freezing cold!!! All we found to do was the Botanical Gardens as everywhere else we went was jam packed with people or it cost money to do, so that was it. There is no IT industry in Adelaide so no chance of work for a visa here, so after only 2 days in Adelaide we were on the road again heading towards Victoria.
Nothing to see on the way except the rain lashing the windscreen so we drove as far as we could, eventually stopping at a little town called Mount Gambier, just shy of the Victoria state border. Nice clean site and ended up chatting to a lovely old expat couple who came over from the UK in the 60's.
Next morning before we left we went and looked at 2 lakes, Blue and Valley, just outside the campsite. They are in the crater of an old volcano and was pretty good to see as for the first time since we arrived in South Australia it wasn't raining!!! Then we hit the road again towards Peterborough (!!!) in Victoria.
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