6/24/01:  Gone…to the International Date Line

6/25/01: Passed through customs without a hitch and caught our hop from Sydney to Adelaide.  Into Adelaide, we summoned a taxi and scooted to the car rental business…Skippy Rentals.  You just have to love the name of the business!  Since we had prearranged our rental, the job was smooth, and they offered us a mobile phone to use…we just had to get a pre-paid card for it and a charger, which we did.  We took off for the outback!!!!

The vehicle was narrower than the rig we rented last year, and smaller.  Guess it would be called a minivan-conversion-camper in the USA.  Four cylinder Toyota van, but the engine seemed to move the campervan along fine at highway speeds and was much easier  to drive in the usually busy Adelaide traffic.  It was a better vehicle for us…it had a bug screen up over part of the windshield (windscreen in Oz) and the top bar of it blocked my field of vision…Steve was fine as he is considerably taller than I.  I found that a doubled up pillow to sit on solved the problem.  Traveling north on a gorgeous day…we tried to make it to Port Augusta…but were just too tired!  We did make it to Port Pirie…and along the way saw clouds of swarming bugs around the roadside scrub bushes.  We did not see any kangaroos on this stretch of the road, but did see an emu.  It was getting dark, and we needed to get off the road, both for nocturnal animals and because we could hardly stay awake.  Checked into the first motel we came to, “The John Pirie Motor Inn” and booked a lovely room.  To us, it was absolutely the finest room…lace tablecloth on the little table, and a two-person spa in the bathroom…doesn’t get any better than that!  We shared a four-star meal in the dining room…and then zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.