I'm slightly sad to be leaving Adelaide, it had come to feel a bit like home after the weeks spent there. But I'm excited to see what lies North. As we drive out of the city flat plains give way to the undulating hills of the Yorke Penninsula but it's all a sunbleached, straw-coloured ground where the wheat has been harvested with just odd gum trees providing a flash of green, contrasting beautifully with the blue sky. A sliver of sea, our last look, is visible on the left as the Flinder ranges start to appear on the right. We see a few small salt lakes, shimmering white and crystalline, an occasional lurid pink patch where they're not completely dry: cyanobacteria doing their thing. A stop at Port Wakefield then continuing North where the Spencer Gulf ends at North Stirling and goodbye to the sea. 
Into the Flinders ranges we take a short walk at Mambray in Mount Remarkable National park and see some lizards, euros (a smaller member of the kangaroo family) and emus in a big flock down below us in a field. Beautiful scenery and the greenest we're going to see for a while.
Another couple of hours drive North and we're in Quorn. This town was once a major rail centre on the Ghan railway (runs between Adelaide and Darwin) until it was re-routed. This will be first of a few towns that we visit along the old Ghan route and whose heyday has now passed. The original Ghan (first called the Afghan express after the Afghan camel drivers who helped build it) followed the route of the overland telegraph and also the route of John McDouall Stuart taken in 1862 when he crossed Australia. A route with reliable water for steam trains it was notorious for washouts and other problems so eventually shifted 160km West.
It's great to swag down under the stars, it's actually quite cool tonight and by dawn I'm chilly in my sleeping bag and swag- but that's the last time for sometime...
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