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| Getting closer to Port Augusta. |
After we had settled in and contacted an auto electrician we
decided to hit the town. The auto
electrician couldn’t see us until the Monday morning so we might as well make
the most of our time here. Our first
stop was an old water tower look out. I
thought I was semi okay with heights, not brilliant, but this place tested me
as the wind was quite strong and it looked a bit rusty in parts. That being said the view from the top was
spectacular and it was great to get a perspective of the size of the town.
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| View looking out over the port. |
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| The sun setting in the distance. |
I also decided to just google what was on and found out we
missed their local Christmas parade and celebration by one night – bummer. Still the council website had that there was
markets on Sunday morning and Santa would be there. It also had a list of Christmas lights for
around the area so we waited, and waited, and waited and when it eventually got
dark we ventured out to look at Christmas lights. It is hard not knowing the suburbs as you can’t
really map out a route so much and we were a bit all over the shop, but it was
a lovely way to spend the evening. Mind
you it was close to 10pm by the time we got home and both kids were still
bright eyed. We soon put a stop to that
and sent them to bed.
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| Yes we went out looking at lights at 9pm... not very dark. |
The next morning I woke up before everyone else as per
normal and went to type up another blog.
Even if I don’t type a blog, if I can just put down in note form what we
have done the day before it just saves me forgetting when I do eventually get
around to it. The only problem was that
this time when I started up the laptop the screen went all white with a black splodge
to the side. I had no idea what was
going on, so restarted the computer, I mean that fixes everything right! Wrong, so next I went to Jason and asked if
he knew anything about it and that was when he told me Kayla had stood on
it. Well that would do it, but it was my
fault as I had left it on the floor plugged into the charger as I thought
running the cable to the table would surely trip someone up or pull the laptop
off the table. So a big lesson learnt on
my behalf as I think Kayla just saw it as something to help her see what was up
on the benchtop.
Eventually we went out in search of the markets which also
had the lure of Santa visiting. I must
learn not to promise my kids things like this as we found out the hard way that
either the council website is not maintained and updated often or they have no
idea what is going on in their area.
After driving around a few time we accepted defeat that the markets were
in fact not on that day so silly us still followed the council instructions as
to where Santa would be if he wasn’t at the Markets! No he was not there either. Instead we did stumble across a Christmas
tree display competition where people had to come up with unique and creative
Christmas trees or decorations for the trees.
The kids really enjoyed this though Hamish didn’t forget that we had
said he would see Santa today. So my one suggestion for Port Augusta shire
council – please ensure you website is up to date.
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| Of course this was made by the pony club. |
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| Someone is obsessed with dogs. |
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| Thought this snowman was pretty clever. |
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| Quite a lot of awesome ideas. |
The rest of the day was spent food shopping, and seeing if
there was someone local who could fix the laptop. Half our time was wasted with business that
said they did repairs in Port Augusta but really didn’t. One place even asked when we were next in
Brisbane could we drop it in! I hadn’t
even told her we were originally from Brisbane, so obviously she had no idea
where Port Augusta is. My next question
to her was where was her closest repair person?
To this she had no reply. I
thought surely she would have a map of their locations and she could point me
in the right direction – wrong again Trish.
So we cut our losses with that mob and eventually found a local, however
he advised that it would take a few working days to get the new screen and we
were better off waiting until we were in a place long enough to have it repaired. I thanked him for his time and decided to
leave it until we were in Adelaide.
That afternoon we were just relaxing in the caravan park
when another family van rolled in. You
should have seen Hamish’s eyes light up when another little boy, Cade hopped out
of the car. That was it for the two of
them. They had a mate to play with and
they did all day until we pulled them apart just on dark. The family also had two older daughters and
were hot footing it back to Western Australia to get home in time to pick up a
present for their daughter’s birthday. They
had been on the road for eight months and had really enjoyed it but had run out
of time so had driven from the NSW/Victoria costal boarder all around the coast
to Port Augusta in just one week. Now
they had the crossing of the Nullarbor ahead of them.
We also had been chatting to Bert and Eli who were in the
van beside us and they were also heading up to the Flinders Ranges. We hadn’t planned to do that until after
Christmas but as we had six spare days before we had to be in Adelaide (we
snagged a bargain last week) and the weather was still quite nice we decided to
knock that off the list of things we had to see. Jason was keen to do this 4WD track, and well
for me I was still a bit scared and more than happy not to do it. So we just thought we would leave it until we
got there and see how we felt.
The next morning we had asked for a late check out as the
auto electrician was coming at 9am to hopefully fix our caravan reversing
camera. Cade and Hamish were off playing
again and we happily played in the playground whilst the guy looked over our
car. In the end it was such a simple
thing. The guy who had installed it had
accidently wired it to the back air-conditioner cable rather than the
accessories cable. Somewhere along the
path we had turned off the back air-conditioner and that of course also turned
off the reversing camera. So they quickly
fixed up the wiring for us and we were good to go.
We were really in no rush so I was doing crafts with the
kids in our van while Jason packed up outside, and eventually we had to boot
them all out so I could clean up inside and put everything away. Jason got chatting with Paul (Cade’s dad) and
found out they were from Dunsborough and ran a fish and chip shop there. So we said we will have to call in and say hi
when we get around to that part of the country.
Eventually we pulled out and I thanked the lovely staff in reception for
letting us stay later. It really was a
lovely place to stop with friendly managers.
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