Wednesday 6th December – Kings Canyon, entering South Australia and a Cordey of Errors

We had a 6am alarm but didn’t hit the road until just before 7am to make it to King’s Canyon for 9am to do the rim walk.  It was very overcast, even looking like rain, so good for walking. 

We arrived at the start of the walk to find the rim walk was shut – we had literally missed it by about ten minutes!  I think they shut it at 9am on a day when the temperature is expected to reach 36°C (which seemed surprising today).  Instead, we opted to do the South wall return walk, at 4.8km long, and estimated to take two hours. It was hard going, especially during the steep beginning but it was worth it for the view of the canyon. It seemed a shame not to be able to do the rim walk but maybe it was for the best as we still had so far to drive this week.

The sheer walls into Kings Canyon (Newman for scale on the right!)

Back on the road for 1120am, we reached the ‘Centre of the Centre’ road house for lunch and a fill-up. Here began 24 hours of bad luck.  Trying to keep the temperature on the van down whilst we had lunch I had opened the side windows… a fact that I had forgotten a short time later when I went to forcefully open the stiff door, meaning that I put my elbow through the window-netting!  I checked my emails to find that we had been declined the car hire deal to Melbourne AND we had missed a call from imoova saying they’d agreed we’d move a camper for Let’s Go to Sydney on 18^th December (a date we cannot do).  I tried calling them back but couldn’t get through despite repeated attempts, so I emailed them a response explaining that we would be in Tasmania on the 18^th December which is why we’d booked for 19^th in the first place!

All of this, whilst in the background, the RV saga continues.  I know, you’d probably forgotten about that but here we are yet to see a penny (or a cent) for our RV in the U.S!!  I sent Joe another email asking what the heck is going on??! This is getting ridiculous.  Despite telling us that the sale was due to complete in November we are yet to hear any more and it always us chasing for an update rather than being kept informed.  I am starting lose my temper with the whole ordeal now.

Simon drove us into South Australia, where we lost another hour making today even shorter. It was my turn to drive so off we went, even though I was getting a headache.  I carried on driving instead of swapping with Simon…. Which I blamed for the fact that a large stone from a road-train came flying towards our windscreen and took a chip out of our screen.  Within minutes, a bird flew straight into the top of the windscreen... bang!  I was feeling like everything was going wrong.  If only I’d stopped and admitted that I wasn’t feeling great the stone and the bird would not have hit us.  We had wanted to reach Coober Pedy today, but it was too far.  As we were both very tired and not feeling great, we decided to stop for the night.  We stopped to fill up at a roadhouse which had a truck parking area we could stop in for free and it turned out that there was good phone signal that in turn meant the Wi-Fi on the van worked really well.  Having tried to re-book the car and camper successfully we discovered that we could watch a film that Simon had tried to download onto his iPad.  All we had to do was keep re-starting the engine every hour to re-boot the Wi-Fi!

The film was good.  It was nice to have television to watch for a change and just be able to relax!  I passed out, whilst Simon took advantage of the Wi-Fi situation to watch more TV.