Pink Roadhouse in sight

Oodnadatta was the next stop along the famous track. The Pink Roadhouse was on the horizon and was something I was definitely looking forward to. The 200km stretch didn’t present many significant icons but there was always something new to look at. There was one siding that had a large portion of the Ghan railway which dad was pretty impressed with.

Another point was passing through Anne Creek, which is the world’s largest cattle property having 1million square acres. I tried to put that into perspective as Kokatha’s farm has 330 square acres which I mustered only 40% of. Starting from one side of the fence to the other was about 20km. Every time we went over a grid, I asked Dave how we would muster that paddock and how would we not get lost? We had to keep our wits about us though; constantly watching for wandering stock. Hitting a 1 tonne bull, even with our troppy and massive bull bar would still do some enormous damage. Somehow these big, slow animals are still able to magically appear out of the middle of nowhere.  Other random animals have been seen including 2 dingoes, a family of ducks with their chicks, only 2 kangaroos, no emus, 5 wedge-tail eagles, countless hawks and bloody crows. Every afternoon dad stairs up into the gum trees and says: “fark birds, I’ll shoot you, you black bastards”. 

The Roadhouse was like the light at the end of the tunnel. I was waiting for the Pink glow and the sixties style ambiences. Once we arrived I took as many photos as I could, ran inside and admired the layout. We filled up on fuel only $1.95 costing us about $230 for a tank and a half K. Anyway, we wanted to get the low down some tracks around the area so the local tyre man with 30 years experience in the area would sure to know right? We ventured into his work shop and kindly asked him for some information. Walking out he seemed happy to help. He gave us a very brief low down when he started up on tyre pressure pointing at our car describing how bad our tyres were and what a bad set up it was...unknowing it was ours. (Note: we received advice from Bridgestone on what pressure to run our tyres at on gravel...which they were at). I told him straight up that was our car, the tyre pressure was right even according to his advice, the tyres have done 55,000kms without any damage what so ever, and we have been places with that set up with no issues what so ever. He followed that by firmly stating that ALL Troopcarriers are death traps and further pushed the argument that our tyres were all wrong. So things got bad. It got to a point where I had to get out my tyre gauge and show him the front and back tyre pressures were all right. Once proven wrong he was still persistent that we shouldn’t be on the road. Unfortunately, my image of the Pink Roadhouse will now always be that cranky, old, know it all man, in the dirty garage.

No matter what anyone says about our car; I love it to pieces! It was built from the inside out to how we like it. No one has the right to tell me otherwise.               THAT’S MY RANT.

After a free night bush camping, there was one last thing we had to do. Almost every ‘DIP’ sign had a saying attached to it. For example: “Lucky DIP”, “DIP shit” etc, can’t remember anymore. So over the 600km of road we thought of our own saying. The very last DIP sign on the Oodnadatta Track magically appeared the very exact saying we wanted to say.

On road humour is better when made by yourself.