Leaving Coober Pedy headed for the Northern Territory

You would think that if you are spending the night underground it would be the one time your oldest would sleep in past the crack of dawn, right? Wrong! 4 AM! And staying in a cavernous room only meant the noise carried so we decide to put them in the car and check out some of the sights we thought we wouldn't have time for!

First of all we set off to find the Breakaways. We had a hand drawn map that said to follow the highway for 9 clicks. When we hadn't spotted the turn off yet we decided to push it to 20k's. By then we still hadn't seen the turn off so we decided to turn back and go in search of the Dog Proof Fence. That was a little easier to find!

How's that for a size 14 in the pristine red dust!

Anyway, it turns out that just past the Dog Fence is the moon plains. Apparently NASA came out here to prepare for its space movies.... I mean adventures!

It was desolate! Seriously hardly a blade of grass. No living vegetation to speak of just dirt and rock! We later discovered the black rock is iron stone. Nathan had thought some careless road workers had carelessly spread blue metal around the whole of the interior of Australia! And now that I think of it we were on a dirt road! So how on earth could it be blue metal????

Then just after the moon plains were the elusive Breakaways! And am I glad we found them!

The Breakaways were my highlight of the trip. I am not sure why I felt such an affinity with them, I just did!

The breakaways is a place of secret men's business. It is a special place for young boys, perhaps a place for initiations.

I felt good that i had taken my young boys to the place for young boys. Although I shouldn't have really been there! But it was all good, perhaps I was a young boy in a previous life!

These hills had so many differently coloured rock and sands in them and all in the one hill!

This rock formation is called "Papas" it means two dogs. If you squint you can see two different coloured dogs lying next to each other.

White man calls these the salt and pepper castles.

I think because we were there at daybreak made it even more spectacular. And for all of you that get sleep ins this is what 5am looks like in the middle of no where!

We headed back to town and discovered we had turned back less than a kilometer from the turn off earlier than morning!

We had our breaky, packed up and headed off to cross the border and meet my brother.

We were a little disappointed to cross into the Northern Territory and for it to be raining and as cold as it was when we left Canberra!










I cheered up a little when the speed limit increased to 130kms! Even though it is the legal speed limit you still feel naughty travelling that fast! And do you know that only one car overtook me the whole trip and it was a cop car! He was doing at least 150km/hr!

We made it to Elrundie just before lunch. We had prearranged to meet my brother there but we had had no phone reception for a day and a bit so we were just crossing our fingers he would be there!

Turns out he was waiting for us in the pub. Took us a while to find him though. But he did rescue us from the old duck who just had to come up and say hi to us because we were from Canberra. She was from Canberra, well actually she was from Captains Flat, well actually not Captains Flat but just out of Captains Flat! Seriously the outback is teeming with lonely old people! Whilst this lovely lady was chatting to us her husband was chewing off the ear of another travelling couple! We were the youngest travellers by about 30 years! And grey nomads are their own secret little club. They all gather together by their caravans and chat about where they have been, where they are going, what roads are open (we were asked if we knew if the Oonadatta track was open? What? We have a girly 4 wheel drive (explanation later!) how would we know!)

Anyway it was interesting to experience the grey nomads! I just wished they would drive their caravans a little faster!

It was nice to chat to Noddy for a hour or two. We got this awesome photo. Matthew is giving Nod some gorgeous rabbits ears which he really deserves. Noddy's karmic payback is going to be his 3 rambunctious nephews!