Coober Pedy to Port Augusta

We packed up as quickly as we could in the morning - the heat was pretty intense quite early, we were hoping to do a tour of another old mine and then get driving early-ish.

As it turned out the mine was closed for a week so we stopped to do some noodling in the pit out the front. There was lots of colourful stones so we enjoyed this for a while - all waiting for THE ONE... Eventually Mars managed to pry us away and we started our long drive back to Port Augusta.

The trip back was pretty uneventful, we saw a few emus but not a lot of other wildlife. We were about 5kms out of Port Augusta when Mars noticed the car was losing power and he couldn't get anything out of the accelerator... So we pulled off to the side of the road and Mars had just popped the bonnet when another car pulled up (that we had just overtaken). Turns out to be a pair of German backpackers but the bonus was the guy had just been working as a mechanic in Uluru for the previous 3 months! Yay for us! He suggested it may have been dirty fuel - in Uluru the petrol stations water down the unleaded so it's not as appealing to 'sniff'.  Mars had a full jerrycan on the back of the car so he topped up the tank with that and we managed to drive into Port Augusta.  We were very thankful for this but I was already having visions of RAC picking us up and putting us up in a hotel for the night... haha!

Our view of the Flinders Ranges for a long part of the drive

I did some grocery shopping while Mars took the kids to the skate park. We had dinner at the park which was on the side of the wharf.

From there we drove about 30 minutes out of Port Augusta called Winninowie to camp on an inlet. We arrived in the dark so couldn't really see what our location looked like!