Gismo Queen and her King

Our location is Rawnsley Park Station in the Flinders Ranges. Every other time we've been here (which is a few now) we've stayed at Wilpena Pound, so we wanted to try something different this time. This is a former sheep station turned tourism - although they still run sheep and you can even buy them in the caravan park shop or eat them in the restaurant! We've chosen bush camping so we're away from the main areas. It's quite beautiful, looking out over the Pound. Our campsite is in the shadow of the rock walls and we're completely by ourselves. This is camping our style.

We left Port Augusta at about 10am and headed out to Quorn. Today wasn't a big driving day which always makes me happy! We stopped in Quorn for morning tea. Regular readers of this blog may remember our fairly hectic dash to Quorn last August in order to see the Afghan Express steam train pull into Quorn. No steam train today, and apparently I missed the diesel heritage train as we drove along, but we went to our favourite (dare I say, our regular?) cafe for coffee and quandong pie.

Back on the road, we drove north to Hawker and then towards the Flinders Ranges. The countryside is fairly sparse and flat so it didn't take long to get here for a late lunch. You can tell there's been a bit of rain which still worries us for the drive up the Birdsville Track but we shall see. We even put the Landcruisers into low range to get out to our campsite! A bit of work to level the vans but we were soon set up and sitting in the sunshine for lunch. The weather changed a bit over the afternoon, including the first shower of rain just after we lit the fire. Despite the odd dash back under the awning for shelter, we eventually got the fire warm enough and enjoyed our dinner and toasted marshmallows washed down with Baileys. In order to preserve some firewood, we headed into the diesel heater warmth by about 9pm. Hopefully the weather will improve over coming days.