Northern South Australia

Leaving Menindee, we made our way toward Broken Hill along what can be best described as a roller coaster of a road.

We drove through Broken Hill without stopping and stopped for lunch at Manna Hill before continuing onto Peterborough. We had a slight headwind for the day, and I was surprised when I checked my fuel consumption; we'd only used 22 l/100 km.

We are camped at a new RV stop in Peterborough that wasn't here on our last visit. It's on the western end of town, about a 15-minute walk away, allowing a maximum of 5 days. The only facilities are rubbish bins and a bottle collection site with proceeds going to the local youth centre.

It's for fully self-contained vans, but during our stay, we've seen sliders and camper trailers using the site and people flouting the rules by dropping their water on the ground. So I suppose if this continues, this site will end up closing just like so many other sites have because people just can't follow the rules.

We visited all the attractions during our stay and found the steam-train exhibit outstanding. Colin, our tour guide, worked for South Australian railways for 25 years, and he was a hive of knowledge, even having been on some of the exhibits during his career.

We've been experiencing problems adding Adblue to our Chev, and the small amounts we add do not show up on our vehicle's display. We have the necessary device to use at garages that fit over the nozzle but can only add a few litres at a time, so we drove to Jamestown on one of our days to pick up a 15-litre container of Adblue to take with us.

The days here are getting busy, and tonight there will be about thirty vans. The temperatures have also started to drop, with our coldest being -0.3 and daytime temperatures hovering around the 13-degree mark, although the wind chill factor makes the temperature feel about half that.

During our stay, we enjoyed two lunches out at the Junction Hotel after a recommendation from Greg, who owns a Bushtracker and who we met in Menindee. The meals are huge and very well priced. On our first visit, I thoroughly enjoyed my squid schnitzel, and Ros enjoyed her chicken schnitzel. On the second visit, the seafood basket I ordered was immense, and Ros enjoyed her spinach fettuccine.

Tuesday next week is the start of the Big Red Bash at Birdsville, and traffic has increased considerably during our time here.

We are also heading north with the traffic but will only be driving just 160 km to spend the night camped behind the Craddock Hotel. There is a gin distillery at Quorn that makes four different flavours, and we know the pub here does tastings and sells the gin, and we plan to enjoy dinner.

Flinders Gin comes in four flavours: butterfly pea flower, outback lemon-lime, farriers and quandong gin, and if they are to our liking, and they were so, we purchased a lemon-lime and quandong.

We both ordered and enjoyed the chicken schnitzel, which was quite large.

We ventured further north from Cradock, stopping in Hawker to purchase fuel at $2.50 per litre before continuing further north. We usually drive into a headwind, but for the past two days after leaving Peterborough, we've had an ever so slight tail wind which is really nice for a change.

We stopped briefly at Parachilna for a photo and could see that camping is no longer available across from the pub before moving onto Leigh Creek and having a brief drive around town.

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It was then just 25 km north towards Farina, where we stayed for the next two evenings. The bakery was in full swing after being closed for the past week due to COVID. On our way in, we stopped and bought two sausage rolls for lunch and a loaf of bread before making our way to the camping area. Fees are $10 per person nightly, and they have showers and toilets, but as usual, we always prefer to use our own.

Lovely clear days can mean only one thing, and yes, the following morning, it was just 0.8degrees outside and 2.3 inside the van until we cranked up the diesel heater. It was back into bed until the interior was at an acceptable level to get up and change.

We lunched again the next day with chunky meat pies from the bakery and enjoyed a beer with it.

This trip has coincided with the Big Red Bash so we are dodging the masses as they head to and from the Bash