Thursday 5^th July

We pointed the truck and van toward a place called Parachilna.  Now Bob and I had a discussion as to how it was pronounced – like many of these outback places there are some with names a bit tricky to get the tongue around.  I had to ask a local and I was pronouncing it incorrectly.  It is a “ch” as in “cheese”. This is a town (?) with a population of 3 permanent residents.  The railway sees the coal train pass by each day on its way to Leigh Creek in order to load coal and it returns to Port Augusta to offload its cargo.  The train is almost 3 km long – no wonder it seemed to go and go and go.

Anyway, the Prairie hotel is quite well known and I can see it does a very good trade.  Quite a number of tourist buses stopped for refreshments and around lunchtime a plethora of caravans could be seen in the parking area – no doubt all beating a path to eat the “Feral Mixed Grill”.  This meal  contains, emu, kangaroo, goat and camel….hmmmmm.

We decided to spend the night here as it was on the way to a crossroads where we were to decide our next journey.  A case of throwing a dice to see if we headed further north to the end of the tar to a place called Lyndhurst, or to travel east to Blinman.  The latter won as we had heard that apart from the coal mine up north here would be little else to keep us interested.