So Baroota ruins campground is on the west side of the Southern Flinders Ranges, once a homestead from the 1800’s now it is barely a shell of it’s former glory.  But there is a nice small, somewhat expensive camp-site that consists of about 9 hard gravel spots, and a long drop loo. For which they charge us $20 something a night. But it’s a great little spot with plenty of birds, skips and the weird funny hiss/growly night creature we are as yet to see let alone  identify, think feral cat mixed with possum and you might be somewhere close to the sound.

Morning dawns, and we still have battery,”yay,” we say and do a little dance while waiting for the kettle to boil.

Then the usual morning routine of coffee, breakfast, coffee, roll the bed up, maybe more coffee, teeths and then hit the road ( or maybe another coffee)

We head just a few km up the road to Mambray Creek day use area in the Mt Remarkable National Park. The other camp-site is there, recently redone and looks very nice …. do we have campground envy? Nope, we loved our little isolated camp. Plus there are many more people camped here.

We decide to do the creek walk, about 3km, as all the others are too long for us without staying here another night. It’s a pretty little walk through the river redgums that they call Wirra.

The trees are massive, even though the creek is dry, they dwarf us as we move amongst them, watched by a couple of lazily curious skips.

Upon returning from the walk we stop to watch a lace monitor examine a firepit for any leftovers and then also we discover this camp has not only flushing toilets but hot and cold showers, and we never knock back the opportunity for a free hot shower, so we park up the bus and in we go.

Feeling refreshed, we then head off back up the Germain gorge road, we have done this now 4 times, twisty and windy, but so spectacular it never gets old.., (ok maybe just a bit) This road used be used by the bullock trains to cart wheat to the port for shipping out, and all the goods the early settlers needed back home up the gorge, but for us its just a specky drive.

As it was someone’s special day today, we look for a bakery to celebrate, the first one for this trip. We drive up to Laura ( yes we sang the song as well) and walked around the town, a typical country heritage town, but no bakery tempted our taste buds, however, whilst heading  back towards our camp for the night, we came across the little tiny town called Stone Hut.

And yes there were stone huts, but also a little bakery that sold every imaginable flavour of pie, Like ‘Garlic Seafood’ and ‘Steak Diane’, the birthday girl opted for the Chicken, White wine and Camembert while I had a good olde fashioned meat and veg pastie. Followed by cherry ripe slice and for her a cake…. delectably dark moist chocolate angel muffin… with fancy cream stuff. We were hungry and ate them before thinking of taking a photo, but in the words of younguns nowadays, OMFG!

Feeling a little bit guilty we drove into our camp, in the Forrest, had the entire camp to ourselves, celebrated further with a nice campfire, green ginger wine, a steak sandwich and baked spuds for tea……. what a Remarkable birthday it was.