After travelling up the Spencer Gulf and staying at Whyalla overnight we headed up to Quorn for the weekend.
Whyalla is an iron-ore loading port with over a hundred years of ferric oxide patina on less than beautiful houses arranged in suburbs around missing nuclei. The town centre nuclei is Hummock Hill overlooking the Gulf and the port.
In Whyalla we made a point of visiting the Maritime museum with it's high and dry corvette HMAS Whyalla, which we found interesting and redolent of imperial attitudes to the crew. The museum was good in that it gave a decent view of the area without being preachy.
Amazingly when we last passed through Port Augusta in 2004 we got into a huge tail-back from roadworks at the two lane bridge. The heritage listing should be on its way, the workers seem sure of tenure.
Quorn is the home of the famous Picchi Ricchi Railway, we have a lot of photos of steam and diesel locos and the sweet little railway station.
We're doing the tourist bit, including a tour of the railway workshops. We are staying 3 nights and also aim to get our tyres fixed Monday am. Tip: Don't buy Federal tyres, they changed the handling from tall go-kart to pin-ball on a trawler. (We have a slow leak on rear tyre, almost flat after 3 days here).
Being the end of the campfire season the campground is packed with walkers as they make the most of the last days of the month.
Tomorrow, Monday, we hope, after the tyre business, to head for Peterborough. Like many SA towns it had a name change in the Great War, Petersburgh was too German.
The country is red and burnt dry, the best thing is that the stone has been split by the weather into perfect building blocks. Sadly SA has the mania for fibro sheet big time!
The SA colony was started with only free settlers and Wendy remarked that they do seem to be short, physically that is, and now that I look down, it's true!
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