SUNDAY

Happy birthday to you, Happy birthday dear Bruce, Happy birthday to you!!!!!! Loud cheers.

The sun has returned, a raven calls for breakfast and birthday cake and "she sleeps".

The day is cool with a breeze and the sky is littered with clouds. We drive just a short distance and we are onto the Strezleki Track - really an extremely well formed oil and gas extraction industry maintained highway. We zoom North towards Moomba. Well signposted roads turn off at regular intervals - oil rig this and gas field that. On occasions we see oil and gas extraction pipe;ines and off in the distance tall radio masts here and there.

We crest a dune and a long streak of black smoke is wiped across the already grey clouds. To our Right is Moomba, a huddle of industrial constructions, pipes bedecked with a pipe with the eternal flame of industry flickering in the wind. A chimney with aspirations to its Dickensian roots and puffs the economic peace pipe. We pause in the chilled wind before skirting the encampment to the West and feeling our way through a maze of roads as we head for the Walker Crossing of Cooper Creek.

As we pull away from the main corporate army encampments we see cattle grazing on flat plains backed with delicately dressed sand dunes. The landscape is pastrol and relaxing.

The cultivated lands give way to a topsy turvy landscape of sand hills and flat dry lakes. The road morphed from dirt road to a tangle of spaghetti like tracks, some still harbouring the slowly evaporating slime from previous rain. We twisted and turned, each eye full of landscape a carefully crafted set of Dulux colour cards with a new mix of desert earths and wild flowers. The track crosses the corner of the Innaminka Nature Reserve (or what ever it is called) which is a fantastic area of birds, land forms and vegetation. The clouds threaten rain and this is not a track to be held up on under the circumstances - at a different time well it would be fine.

We break out of the chopped up country into flat gibber plains with widely spaced sand dunes capped with a rich bloom of vegetation. On occasions the road side and the centre is encrusted with delicate wild flowers and rich green herbage. We stop for lunch where the small plants thrust up from the mosaic of red gibber and appear like a miniature forest seen from the air.

As we reach the Birdsville Track an Orange Chat (bird) crosses our path and we stop to try and get a photo but he has gone. The track is in good shape and we make good time through to Birdsville. The rain has watered the track in places leaving it tacky. As we drive into town the outskirts are littered with caravans and camps, maybe early for the Races in two weeks time or maybe just taking a break before moving on.

We stay at the Birdsville Caravan Park so Alison and Bruce can have a shower - the power is off but they manage to get a shower before all the hot water is used up.

It comes in and rains on and off through the night. We gather in the newly named "Flyfree Café" to discuss who plans to do what?

We think we will carry on by skirting South along the Birdsville Track and coming across the Desert from the West. Alison and Bruce will most likely head East to Windorah. Lets see what tomorrow brings.