The Rainbow in the Stone

We ended up staying 1 more day at Yalura before we left for Coober Pedy and Wooz, me and Nat took a camel ride.  Candy took us out and we loved it.  Nat and I rode Lazy Dazy who defying his name was a great race camel, and Wooz rode Diesel who really was lazy.  Candy answered all our questions, telling us all about camels constantly regurgitating their food, but the most interesting fact was Chewie from Star Wars makes a camel noise!

We decided not to take the camels to Coober Pedy however although it still took 2 days in the car.  We stopped overnight in Marla where there was a moth plague and we would've had 1000 in the van, and a few hundred in the car.  We drove into opal country around 2pm the next day and settled into the Oasis (nObASIS for that name) caravan park and a night of rain which apparently is quite unusual in the desert!  Then we got up early to do a tour with old Rudy which was quite entertaining.  We saw the Serbian underground church,

did some noodling in the mullock heaps, checked out the golf course (you need fluro balls to see them),

and ended up at Umoona mine which had a great history on opals, opal mining and fossils.

Then we packed up the van and went to stay at the Desert Cave Motel to give the boys the experience of staying underground, and we ended up enjoying so much the extra space we stayed 2 nights.  We had great sleeps there with the pitch black nights and no sound but one drawback was it stunk.  The Swedoshs did the big drive in 1 hit so we got to hang out together again and checked out the Old Timers Mine, which won the SA tourist award the day before,

and the Comfort Inn where we saw some awesome opal shells and had great ice coffees and milkshakes.
Then we said goodbye to the cave and headed south to Streaky Bay on the Eyre Peninsula.  We did about 250km to Kingoonya mainly on tar, and stopped for lunch.  It was a godforsaken ghost town and the pub had closed down and we saw the biggest redback I have ever seen.

The next 250km were on the dirt and it was fairly muddy from recent rains.  The roads were long and the landscape sparse with salt lakes dotted along the way. 

The vehicles got a clay mask again but most of it got washed off as we hit a huge storm coming into town.  It was another big day at the office, at least 7 hours in the car but we sucked in the sea air and celebrated being back on the coast at the local pub.