Our first week

It's now several weeks ago, so I'm scratching a bit ... the following day (Sunday) we went down to the servo and bought some basics (milk, butter, bacon and eggs, and frozen steak for dinner) and dropped in at the Birdsville Bakery for some freshly baked bread and a coffee — yes, its quite civilised, considering. Everywhere we went, people seemed to know already who we were — a lesson in how quickly news gets around out here. Everyone was very friendly, lots of introductions and hand-shaking, so we were feeling welcome already. Did a bit more unpacking and jumped into the truckasaurus to check out the sand dunes, out in the direction of Big Red (Australia's biggest sand dune, so the tourist info says). Got about 10 kms out of town and realised we'd broken all the rules — we'd told no-one where we were going or how long we'd be, and didn't even take much water. We'd got to some sizeable sand dunes by then, so pulled over and went exploring, before heading back into town for a beer at the pub. Still no gas in the stove, so we cooked the steaks on our little camp stove — and a very good job it did too.






The sand dunes are amazing. The red sand is so fine its almost impossible to walk up if its steep.

Monday the Tourist Info office (and local council office) was open, so we went and introduced ourselves to them, and enquired about our bed and gas for the stove. Alex said there was a transport problem with the bed, but it should be there by the end of the week, and she would ring the council about the gas. By the time we got home about 30 minutes later after a detour to the Bakery for coffee, the council dudes were there to fix the gas. After banging the cylinder with their spanner, someone noticed the gas tap was turned to the missing cylinder outlet, so that took about 3 minutes to sort out. They too were very friendly, and said they would be back next week with plants for our garden bed. Things were looking up.

Can't remember much of what happened the rest of the week, except our bed actually turned up on Friday on the back of a ute from Bedourie, 200+ km northwards, and trailing quite a bit of red dust. We borrowed an industrial vacuum cleaner from Dusty and Teresa from the Bakery — we were getting to be quite good friends by then — and cleaned it up. It was such luxury after a week on the camp mattress! We walked quite a bit, and visited various local sites such as the council depot and the tip in search of the makings of a garden bed for the back yard (its a long way to the shop for anything but a sausage roll), and the local cemetery, a very poignant place. The big happening was the Birdsville Bronc Branding on the weekend.


No flies on me ....


In the cemetery.



The sunsets around here are awesome — with or without clouds.