Wednesday 4^th July

This morning we drove approximately 100 km to Hawker, passing through a number of very small towns, among them being one called Cradock.  Some of you may know that I grew up in Cradoc, Tasmania, so we couldn’t resist taking a little poetic license with this sign.

While in Hawker we got our daily exercise in the form of a good walk of about 3-4 km covering the town absorbing the stories and history as we went.

One of the most beautiful paintings we have seen so far on our travels was the Wilpena Panorama which is a superbly portrayed uninterrupted 360 degree view from St. Mary’s Peak. It is 33 metres in circumference and nearly 4 metres in depth.  The building was purpose built and the painting took 4,000 hours over 13 months to complete.  It is one of only 4 panoramas in Australia.

Always on the lookout for the unusual we thought you may enjoy looking at granny and grandpa sitting in the garden.

We shared a lovely evening camping under the incredibly bright moon and stars with another couple from Port Lincoln, South Australia.  They were very interesting in that they had only retired about the same time as us, but had cycled through France and Spain over a three month period.  As we got to know them a little more it emerged they are both tri-athletes and I think quite serious ones at that.  They had also accompanied in a row boat a South Australian wooden tuna fishing boat, the Tacoma on a journey from Cockle Creek to Hobart. This is a distance of about 160 km and they spent 9 days on the oars, in time for the Tacoma to join the Tasmanian Wooden Boat Festival.

They had a reason to camp where they did, as Peter’s great grandfather had bought 150,000 acres and put it under wheat in the late 1800’s.  He was buried in a cemetery very close to our camp spot.

By the time the camp fire went out we were tired and crawled into bed.