Port Augusta - a two day stop over!!

Day 6 – 29/3/2011

We left Burra Creek Reserve with sadness as this really was a great spot, overnight Zac had set his yabbie trap and this time it was Zac 9 – Yabbies  0. Zac happily tucked into some yabbies for breakfast, he offered them to his siblings but they declined mumbling something about how much they stank out the caravan.

At last in Burra we got the tyre fixed!! Hopefully we won’t need it for a while – if ever.  We called into the Burra Information Centre and discovered that there was a copper mine museum just out of town that we could go to and that the kids might find interesting.  Firstly though we took a town walk, Burra is a historic town that really caters to the tourists, it has historic tours through houses and a number of museums.

After morning tea we headed to the museum, oh my gosh, the determination of early Australian settlers to settle outback Australia is amazing.  The lady at the museum explained to us and the kids how the machinery worked and then we took a self guided tour that included a look over the open cut copper mine.

Lunch and then we were off to Petersborough where we thought we would spend the night!!  But once again our plans changed, there were limited places to stop and none had toilets and really Petersborough was not as inviting as it looked in the book.  We did though pass though some very small and essentially deserted rural communities.  It was sad to see whole main streets boarded up with maybe only the pub surviving.  Petersborough was a small rural town that is steeped in railway history.  The kids enjoyed going through the Petersborough Information Centre as it was in a restored train carriage.

After a family discussion we decided to head onto Port Augusta!!  The kids clearly voting for a caravan park and a rest day….Pete and I succumbed to their pleas and booked into the Big 4 for two nights.  This would at least give us an opportunity to wash the sheets and larger clothes before we head into central Australia.

We also had our first experience driving though the Kimberly Ranges and it was, well, steep and then as we came through to port Augusta it was flat for as far as the eye could see to the ocean, a beautiful site. 

On arriving at the Big 4 the kids promptly threw themselves into the pool it was 30 degrees in Port Augusta and Pete and I just sat.  It had been a long day of driving for all of us.