Smith's Travels: IDENTIFY THE ROAD KILL - A GAME FOR ALL THE FAMILY

Deny, Deny, Deny. Yep we are in total denial here on the Smith tour. We are very quickly running out of time and we are so sad about it. But to combat this feeling of denial we are finding every back road and dirt track we can to bring oursleves home. Doing a bit of a zig zag on the map you could say. Part of this is because the futher south we head, the colder it becomes. But I suppose all good things must come to an end.

Oh That's how you spell it

Two miners in an Opal mine

Divining for Opals - very clever

Bit of a fixer-upper-a William Creek

We've put in a few big days in the car since we left Uluru to get ourselves further down the road. First stop Coober Pedy. What a place that is... we loved it there. First thing I learnt about Coober Pedy was that it wasn't spelt 'Cooper' with a P for Papa. Nope it's 'Coober' with a B for bravo. Well there you go. Didn't have to pay any tour guide for that snippet of info did I? Suppose I should have paid more attention to the map, instead of standing in wonder underneath the big truck at the entrance to town with the words Coober Pedy in big lettering, and saying- 'oh I think they spelt it wrong'. I would describe Coober Pedy as a combination of scene from 'Mad Max' or the town of Radiator Springs ( from the Cars movie) 85% of the residents live underground in houses carved out of sandstone. It's like another world there. Everyone has Opal fever and everyone watches their back. (and we were also told that everyone carries a gun) Another interesting fact about the place was...it's up to it's fifth police station because each time they build a new one it gets blown up. Every second man has a beard and there are lots of shady looking characters around. But strangly enough it was one of our favourite towns that we've visisted and we felt safe. We took in a Opal mine tour conducted by this crazy young girl who seemed to have a faciniation with explosives. (yes I know I have previously mentioned that we were not going to go to anymore mining tours but we hadn't covered Opals yet)

After there we made a bee line for 'The Oodnadatta Track'

Oodnadatta, what a cool name for a place. Love it! We stopped in at the William Creek Hotel and found ourselves having a beer mid morning with some locals (there are only 12 people who reside in William Creek and most of them seemed to be in the pub) then headed to Lake Eyre.

This was a complete suprise to myself and passengers as I wasn't aware that we were going to be visiting Lake Eyre and we were all quite excited as the lake was full, which is something of a rare occurance - like once every 150years. Here's some interesting facts about Lake Eyre.....

It is actually the lowest point in Australia at -15.3m (or there about's) below sea level
The catchment area for the lake takes in about 1/8th of the total of Australia
Even though the lake is normally empty, no one knows how all the millions of birds that fly there when it's full, know when it's full.
The water is saltier than the sea
And there was a plague of native mice residing there when we camped there - Nice!

We were excited to be at Lake Eyre - even if it wasn't full

Sunset over Lake Eyre

Lake Eyre was a spectacular sight to see and really nice to camp beside. It reminded us very much of home as the air was very salty, there was sand dunes and lots of seagulls. (me thinks we are missing the beach lots). We were quite looking forward to seeing the lake and had been talking to some people at William Creek about it prior to us going there. Whilst we were having this conversation another fellow whom had chartered a flight from Broken Hill to take in the sights of said lake was going on about how disapointed he was about his sight seeing over Lake Eyre, because he had been told that the lake was full. But when he flew over he could see where some of the water had started to evaporate....I'm thinking that this man was your glass half full kind of fellow, considering that it was probably a once in a life time thing to see ANY WATER AT ALL in the lake.

We've since driven through some fantastic small towns whilst making our way south and like I mentioned we have covered some miles. We have also played all our music three times over and no matter how much I try to mix it up there is no escaping the classic hits of Psuedo Echo, The Cars and Van Morrison all in one stretch of road. Geoff especially loves it when I change the words around to the songs. We have created some great games to keep the occupants of the vehichle amused on such journeys. One of which is who can identify the road kill on the side of the road the quickest. Not such an easy task for the driver when he is negotiating road trains, corrugations, massive potholes filled with bulldust and me serenading him from the passenger seat. I have to say it's an easy point score when you drive past a camel laying on the side of the road.

Another good game is to get as many waves as you can from passing motorists. Now this game cam play tricks on your mind and you can suffer from quite a bit of regection when you are faced with a large amount of non wavers in a row. We have found that Far North QLD and the NT were the places that had the most enthusiastic of the wavers. In SA we had to work hard to encourage the wave from passing cars. And people from Victoria were the worst - they just don't wave no matter what state they are driving in. You have to keep an eye out for the late wave too, which can be easily mistaken for a non wave if you are not carefull (it also depends how fast each car is travelling at the time) The game can also be broken down into the type of wave you recieve. But i will leave the technical details of that part of the game for another time. As you can see it is quite an intense game and I will be making a submission to the Olympic committee for the London 2012 games.

We've probably done the last of our bush camping and driven on one our last dirt roads for this holiday which is very sad too. We happended upon a Cattle Station in the Flinders Ranges in SA that let us camp, a few nights ago. It was a massive 450km sq property and was so much fun and so very quiet.

We've landed in Broken Hill, caught up on a bit of 'admin' and having a look around. We are making preparations to head futher south. Tomorrow we are going to have a sit in on a class at the School of the Air. Which should be really intersting - can't wait.

Even though this holiday is fast coming to an end we are still having a ball. The kids are exhausted and are starting to talk about home alot. Perhaps an indication that they are ready to head home? I'm not sure.

So in one week we have vistited Australia's lowest point at Lake Eyre and at the end of the week we will be at Australia's highest point hopefully skiing in some freshly fallen POWDER!

I am not sure if this will be my last oportunity to chew your ear off with our tales, but I just wanted to say how much I have enjoyed sharing our holiday. And to just say that we are truly blessed to live in such a BIG BEAUTIFUL country. It has left us speechess on many occassions and provided us with lots and lots of memories.

Slide night our house upon our return, you are more than welcome.....I promise to cull the 5000 photos I have taken.