Our rest day at Penong was very restful, partly due to rain. We went for a walk in the late morning and had coffee and jam and cream scones at the little cafe/supermarket. In the late afternoon we went for a walk around the famous Penong windmills and got caught in a heavy squall. There was some shelter, but the wind made the rain come through anyway. At the end of the squall we were rewarded with a wonderful rainbow.

We had picked up some brochures on South Australia and I found out something rather important, that the road up to Innamincka from Lyndhurst is mostly gravel. I thought the only part of the trip to the Dig Tree that was gravel was the road out of Innakincka. It might be that we don’t want to tackle that road. Anyway, we don’t need to make a decision at this stage. Map programs don’t show whether roads are gravel or not as they would always be risk being wrong as conditions change. But the brochure clearly shows which sections are gravel and which paved.

I was wanting to make a sort of slight diversion to go to Streaky Bay. We’ve visited in the past, the first time when we were travelling with Eversley and she decided to take a two night break from driving. Streaky Bay. I think we’ve been here twice as we have stayed at the two caravan parks. One is on the foreshore and the other one is a bit out of town and we loved it because it was so clean and new with ensuite style ablutions. On Wikicamps people are still raving about the ablutions!

However, Streaky Bay now offers a low cost camping option next to it’s sporting complex. $15 per night with access to traditional SA concrete Krappas (flushing toilets to the rest of us). After stopping in Ceduna for THE SHOP (the great one you have after not having access to a supermarket for days), and some lunch, we drove down to Streaky Bay. I had forgotten it is a farming village, with giant wheat silos and some very old and well kept houses. It is located on a tiny sheltered bay that is part of a much larger bay on the Eyre Peninsula.

Yesterday we were tired after shopping and travelling, but still wanted to walk to the beach, so we waited until close to sunset. We weren’t sure of the way, but knew the general direction and it’s only about a 10 minute walk, especially as we walked through the caravan park out to the shoreline. The caravans are lined up very close to the water up a little rise, but I don’t think the park actually owns the beach.

The water is calm and shallow and we enjoyed watching the shorebirds, including a great flock of pelicans who were being fed by fishermen on the beach. After that it was back to the van for dinner. We are enjoying having fresh salads. We chatted with Matt after tea. They leave him on his own with us, which works better now that they finally have NBN at his house so they don’t get dropouts. He even found it entertaining to watch us doing the dishes.

We chose a camping spot overlooking some bushland, but we had quite an infestation of mossies last night. We are thinking of driving off and exploring around here, then coming back for another night, but we will try a different position away from the bushland.

If you are wondering what happened with our leaking ceiling, the leak occurs where the bedroom curtain rail seems to have caused a bit of a split in the otherwise smooth ceiling. At Penong I taped most of it up, but left room for rain to come through as having it stay in the roof didn’t seem like a good idea. We were on a bit of a tilt as well, which I thought might let the rain roll off the roof, rather than pooling. We don’t get leaking when we are travelling as even heavy rain is rushed off again. Now I’m not sure what has worked as we didn’t have anymore leaking at our campsite in Penong despite occasional heavy rain. There is a caravan repair and service place in Port Augusta and we may call in there for advice.

The update is due to having time to process some of the images in Lightroom. I am using a ‘travel’ lens 24-240mm and it tends to overexpose the images. It was fairly cheap and I hoped for a lens that could zoom in for wildlife as well as being reasonable for landscapes. But, the images do need processing properly.