What was going to be a family 4WD trip across to Googs Track north of Ceduna, didn’t quite start out that way. Bradley ended up going to Japan for a 2 week school trip, Rachael when hearing of the mice plague over there didn’t want to go and Jenny had to stay back with Rachael. It ended up a mate and his family came over from Canberra so Jenny and Rachael acted as hostesses for them.

As soon as the family vacated the seats some geocachers quickly filled up the seats. We were all heading to an event called Sunny Side Up on Googs Lake. This event had started out with 20 vehicles indicating attendance but when it came to the death knock we were back to 9 vehicles.

With the bulk of the group leaving on the Friday morning at o’dark a clock, there were a few of us that a more leisurely start time and pace was required and we left Adelaide at 10 am on Thursday.

Myself and another vehicle left towards Port Wakefield. We stopped of course at Kiplings Bakery for lunch. On hitting the road, I rang the Burtons who I knew were also out here somewhere and it turned out that they were 500m up the road. We caught up and we had a convoy of 3 heading towards Port Augusta and eventually somewhere to camp after there.

We started grabbing caches from Port Pirie but I had done all these with my first cache find at Port Augusta. (310 km drive to find a cache).

We found some interesting places around Port Augusta including old style tensioning fence posts, train wreck dumping ground, old dump site on a salt lake with a lot of old cars rusting away.

We caught up with the Parrotheads who had grabbed a hotel room for night then headed down the east coast of Eyre Peninsula looking for a campsite. Our goal was Fitzgerald Bay but how to get there.

There was a road called Shacks Road which followed the coast but after driving 22 kms, we came across a padlocked gate, a red flag flying high and signs saying “Keep Out”. It was the Army Training Area and they were very much in attendance this night. Some back tracking and driving around the edge of the Training Area and eventually around 10:30pm we found our campsite at Fitzgerald Bay – the other end of the Training Area.

Camp was set up and with the kids in bed a few beverages were consumed and we started to see flares in the sky, followed by mortar, tracer and machine gun fire. The army was starting their night exercise. This continued well into the night but all we hoped was that their rounds and them stayed on their side of the fence as it would have been interesting waking up to armed camoed soldiers staring into the tents.

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