Living Life: COOBER PEDY

Left Lake Hart this morning (see photo of last night's sunset at Lake Hart) and travelled through to Coober Pedy with a couple of stops on the way. One stop was at Glendambo to use the toilets and I am so pleased we did. Surrounding the area was masses of the Sturt Desert Pea in full bloom. They were absolutely beautiful! We filled up with fuel and then headed off, stopping at a rest area about 200km short of Coober Pedy where we made lunch and had a cuppa. We had decided to use the portable gas cooker to boil the kettle and we put it on the ground to try to block the wind. Almost as soon as Royce put it down a gecko ran under it. When packing it up Royce found the gecko had gone into the cooker, not just under it. He was looking for the gecko and it fell out of the gas cooker. Poor thing looked a bit the worse for wear but Raymond picked it up and put in the grass and it ran off. Behind the rest area is a fabulous looking camping spot where we will probably spend a night or two on our return leg. We walked around exploring that area for a while (see photo) then continued on. While driving to CP we picked up some chatter on the UHF radio which went a bit like this:
PERSON 1: Must be old
PERSON 2: Or Mum is driving
ME: Nope - Mum's not driving
Note - both person 1 and person 2 must have thought the other had said this
PERSON 1 or 2: Then they must be old
These people were travelling behind us and were commenting on the fact that we were toodling along at about 80-85kph.
ME: Not old but getting there
At this point the penny dropped for person 1 & person 2 and they sounded a bit embarassed to be caught out! We laughed about it and chatted with them for a while after they had overtaken us. It was quite hilarious!
We got into CP about 4pm and went to find Royce's cousin Katrina. Katrina and her husband Trevor live in CP. We discovered they are both overseas on holiday so our timing wasn't that good. We went to the Information Centre to suss out a caravan park, dump site (wastewater) and to fill up our water tanks (as we had been told by other campers getting water at CP is hard). It turns out you have to buy your water so after a bit of driving back and forth we positioned the caravans so we could empty the toilets (only to find that you have to pay to get some water to rinse out the cartridges as well!) then to fill up our water tanks. The type of hose fitting to the water supply didn't fit in our caravan inlet very well and we were spilling more water than we were getting into the tanks. Royce jiggled and jossled and finally got the tanks filled up. We found out later that we were using the wrong hose and there was another one that we should have been using.
We booked into the Big 4 caravan park and got the caravan into position, set it up and put up the awning. We have booked for 2 nights at this stage but we may well stay 3 nights.
By the time Raymond and Hazel booked in and set up their caravan it was almost 7pm and too late for cooking (and we were all pretty stuffed) so we went in and ordered pizza for tea. While we were waiting for that we went for a walk and found an opal shop that was still open so we went in and had a look. The people in the shop were lovely. Mum cuts and polishes the opal and the adult son works in the shop. The opal is mined by dad who has worked the opal mine since the early 1970s. Royce bought me a lovely bracelet for my birthday and we will probably go back and have a better look around in that shop (and the others in CP) tomorrow.
The weather has been a bit kinder to us today. Not very windy and whilst we have had a bit of rain through the day it has been pretty light and fairly intermittent.