Rocketland!

We finally arrived in Woomera last night. The winds were absolutely insane! Danny said he's been in Woomera when it was windy (and it can get windy) but he'd never seen anything like this before! Next to where I pulled up there was a fully laden 4WD parked, with what looked like a mound of tarps covered in a card table. Danny told me that this couple had pulled up and attempted to put up their dome tent in the wind, but gave up and just threw a tarp, table and a handful of bricks on top... we had a good (quiet) chuckle... There was NO way you could put a tent up in wind like that!

After a being gently (ha ha!) rocked to sleep I woke feeling fairly well rested and ready to take a look around town. Woomera is the home of rocket and weapons testing in Australia, which was really exciting on two counts, firstly, I absolutely love space stuff, used to sit out watching the stars when I was a kid, trying to spot satellites (this was out on the farm, before I moved to the city and forgot what stars were). A couple of times we found fallen weather balloons on our property, I think my brother had me going for quite a while that they were actually from space ships, or aliens or something. Secondly, I'm helping with a project at the moment, a story about a Robot Man (possibly named 'Robert', or, my favourite, 'Ro-Bert'!), I won't give the story away, but basically (I think) it's going to be about him trying to get home, so I thought Woomera would make the perfect first stop for him.

There's a neat museum here, unfortunately it wasn't open while we were there, so we just headed back to "Spuds" to fill up and have a coffee before pushing on to Coober Pedy. Spuds is a roadhouse in Pimba, just a couple minutes out of Woomera, where you can get a hot shower for $3.50, and stay the night for a gold-coin donation (which means $1 I guess :P). The coffee here, well, you get two options, put your money in a machine and it'll make it for you (these always remind me of that email going around with the monkey hiding in the machine pee'ing in the coffee), or you buy a sachet of stale instant coffee, and try to find where their hot water tap is... Living in Melbourne for the past however-many-years I'm a little more discerning about my coffee than I used to be, so before I left I picked up a fresh box of frothy instant latte & cappuccino sachets, so we just sat outside and made our own.