We arranged to meet our friends at 10:00am so we were in no hurry to rise from bed. Nevertheless, we did get up before 7:30am and it was still a little dark when “He” ventured to the ablution block.
Following on from the cancellation of our planned ground tour of Olympic Dam, we had looked at brochures on the previous evening and decided to head to Whyalla instead of Roxby Downs and visit the steel works (a public tour is available) and also the museum where the HMAS Whyalla is the principal exhibit.
It didn’t take long to make a booking for the steel works and also to secure a site in a Whyalla caravan park. We also made arrangements to visit Roxby Downs at a later time during this trip and we rebooked the tour of the mine and made changes to our caravan park booking. The cancellation of the ground tour next week has actually expanded the dimensions that were planned for this trip.
Whilst looking at brochures we also discovered that the famous Len Beadell is buried at Woomera. Len was responsible for locating the site for Woomera and also the sites used for the atomic testing after WW2. Len was also responsible for opening up the majority of outback Australia through a network of roads he was responsible for creating. We will locate his grave and pay our respects when we stop in Woomera.
We collected our friends at 10:00am and headed north to the Headings Cliffs Lookout where we spent a considerable amount of time enjoying tho view of the Murray River and the adjacent cliffs and wetlands. We also enjoyed the antics of numerous pelicans soaring above us.
After leaving the lookout, we headed to a camp site located further down the road to the lookout and on the banks of the river. This site looks to be an excellent free camp (there are no facilities at all other than a garbage bin) and is accessible for caravans. There were a couple of caravans there and a tent. It is remote!
We then visited a boutique brewery (The Woolshed Brewery) and would have purchased some items had someone bothered to come and see us. In fact we could have walked out unchallenged with items laying around.
We returned to Paringa and stopped at the Bert Dix Memorial Park near the Paringa Bridge. The bridge is an opening bridge that opens at 9:30am and 2:30pm each day to allow traffic to pass through. We then visited Lock 5 (on the Murray) where we watched a house boat travel up the lock. We had a late lunch at a small café in Paringa.
We said farewell to our friends and then headed back into Renmark.
At 4:30pm we took ourselves and cameras to the banks of the Murray to photograph the sunset. Without cloud the sunset was unfortunately a little boring but we did manage to take a picture of a father who had to strip off to his undies to retrieve a football his daughter had kicked into the river. We have an email address and will forward the picture when we return home.
Tomorrow we start our journey north further into South Australia.