Day Six - Heading Bush

Mt. Dare pub
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So although I awoke to the most colorful sky I've ever seen and I had the opportunity to go into the nice warm waters again I was just too tired to get up! So I slept in for the first time in a while. This was the morning to do it as we were heading to Mt Dare pub, only a 2 hour (at the most) drive from the campground.

We had the luck of being at the pub for their opening party. The pub has been around for some time but they finished building the new one a year ago and tonight was the opening party. We arrived about noon and after settling in to our campground we headed into the pub, conveniently part of the campground. I took the opportunity of a day of rest to wash my clothes as I seem to be having bad luck and something in the trailer is leaking onto my bag, causing my clothes to be wet, and as you can imagine, rather smelly after sitting in my bag all day. I was never so happy to wash my clothes by hand and I used my remaining detergent left over from India, how strange is that! I still had one of those little Tide packages that has instructions as to how to do your wash in the bucket, as that was how I did my laundry in India. There was a sink here and it was HOT but fortunately that meant that my clothes would dry fast. The only drawback being that my underwear would have to be hung on the line in the campground in a rather exposed area, but I wanted to have clean undies at that point so I was willing to overlook this.

View from the pub
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Most of the day was spent hanging out in the air conditioned pub but we did have the chance to see a presentation on satellite radios, or the different types of radios they have for use in the outback and how important they are to keep track of where people are. I have to admit that I don't remember what types of radios they were exactly, all I know is that they are rather expensive, but as the people put it, how much are you willing to pay for your life?

After we had a very interesting dinner of baked potatoes with every kind of imaginable topping option we headed off to the pub for the festivities. They had a band, well, they had two singers with guitars and a recorded sound system, but they were really quite good! The locals were out in force and they didn't make us feel as if we weren't welcome. There were even people from Adelaide that had come up for the festivities. That being said it wasn't like there were a ton of people, but there were definitely enough people for a party. The festivities ended with a whip cracking contest that never quite materialized due to a malfunctioning whip. All I know is that the guys that were doing the cracking before the whip broke were quite impressive. There was NO way I was getting near the whip, I'm sure I would have some sort of spaz attack and cut my face or worse yet hit someone else! As we were standing outside waiting for the contest to begin it started to drizzle. This was the first time we had experienced rain on our trip and it took some time to pull out the tarp to protect us from the rain before we hit the hay. I decided to go to bed (Sarah and Stu were the only two from our group who decided to continue the party) as we were getting up super early in the morning to make up the lost time by staying at the pub for the party as this was not the typical stop for the evening. I have a very cool Mt Dare keychain to commemorate the event.