Gismo Queen and her King

Happy Birthday, Greg!

And for his birthday, Greg has had lots of driving, a burger lunch at the Mungarannie Roadhouse, and a very unique campsite on the banks of Bloods Creek!

We aimed to start our engines at 9am, which we achieved. I was still not feeling great so it was decided that Jude would drive the Bushtracker and Neill would drive Mighty Merlot. We had a girls car and a boys car! We had noticed a tap next to the toilets at our campsite and after testing it last night, we figured it would be OK for our shower water so we drove over there to fill up. With two filters trying to improve the water, it took a long time to fill but "have a chat" (Lisa, Neill has inherited Kobi's nickname!) was chatting to our fellow campers and the sun was nice so it wasn't hard to pass the time.

Soon we were back on the Birdsville Track, heading north. The road wasn't too bad. We stopped in at the old Mulka ruins for morning tea. This was originally "the loneliest store in Australia" and it operated for 30 years from 1923 - even selling petrol from 1927. It was pretty sad, and must have been an awful and lonely place at the time.

On the road again, it was up to Mungarannie to the roadhouse, roughly half way along the Birdsville Track. We arrived just in time for lunch. After filling the vehicles with fuel, we parked and entered the pub for lunch. The publican - an older bloke with very long grey hair and beard - saw Greg coming and greeted him with "good thing I got rid of the pool table, I hate it when people bring their own cue"! He then went on to say that he had heard Greg was coming, that a bloke had been in telling them about Greg. We worked out it was Murray - the bloke we had met in the Flinders Ranges. Anyway, we had a great lunch but as luck would have it, their coffee machine broke down last week and the new one was due in at 4pm today! So it was back to Cafe Bushtracker for capucinos and then we hit the road again.

The road north of Mungarannie was pretty ordinary. We could see why this section of the Track was still closed until 2 days ago. Although there were two tracks flattened from the various vehicles, the rest of it was still pretty wet and slushy. We even had to go through a couple of river crossings - highly unusual for the desert. There were cattle on the road, they were looking very fat and healthy due to all the feed. Other than that, the scenery was pretty flat and boring. The slight hills out of Mungarannie were flat topped red hills, but the sand dunes around the Lake Eyre catchment were quite different. After driving for two hours, we were 30km out from our proposed campsite when we pulled into a roadworks depot for a rest and the site manager suggested a different campsite at Blood Creek. So we pulled in at Blood Creek and what a nice place it is. A few trees, plenty of firewood (someone had kindly left us a pile of firewood), lovely scenery, dingo tracks in the sand - and we've got it to ourselves!

Soon the birthday beers were out (it was a lovely warm 20C day), followed by smoked salmon on toast (one of Greg's favourites), then lamb cutlets for dinner, then golden syrup dumplings for dessert. We put a singing candle and a sparkler into Greg's dumpling, and sang for him. Just after his nieces had sung happy birthday down the satellite phone line! Washed down with Scotch, shared around the campfire as we were enjoying the still, quiet night air (it feels like we are the only ones on the Track again), Greg reckons it was a pretty good birthday.