We eventually left Mildura with an apparently fully-functioning car shortly after noon. The staff at the motel were all very good and understanding, which was very nice indeed.

Our first stop of the day was at Berri to investigate The Big Orange that we’d read so much about in our new book. Imagine, dear reader, the disappointment when we arrived to discover a huge ‘Closed’ sign and a padlock on the gate.

Shortly after the first stop was a town called Barmera (in South Australia, don’t forget to put those watches back half-an-hour!) where we were to fill up and change drivers. We filled up, returned to the car and were absolutely aghast to see green coolant leaking all over the forecourt. I popped the bonnet to see coolant leaking out of the pipe that had been the cause of our delay this morning and felt absolutely furious. There was nothing I could do about it, we were 200km away from the garage by now. We moved the car away from the petrol pumps (not that the service station was particularly busy) and a kind passer-by stopped to help. He recommended a local mechanic, who appeared in a few minutes and identified the problem as the housing to the replaced thermostat: there was no way that the pipe could form a seal with this aged piece of metal, as was proved when the jubilee clip was tightened and the radiator was topped up with rainwater… it came straight out at the thermostat housing! We limped the poor old Ford Laser back to his workshop and the mechanic set off on a 20km journey to get a replacement housing and a new pipe. He said we’d be on the road within an hour. We used the time to investigate Barmera. Unfortunately it was far too hot in the sun to walk around the beautiful lake so we stopped into a pub for a couple of colas and a few games of pool. We considered booking into the local YHA but decided that we’d await the outcome of the mechanic’s work. He was delayed in traffic. There are not many passing places on the section of the Sturt Highway as we had discovered earlier in the day. Once he was back, though, he had the whole unit reassembled in no time and adjusted the timing, so everything was running like clockwork. It was annoying to have to pay for the same job to be done twice in one day, but c’est la vie, I suppose.

On the road again! We drove through Morgan to Burra (listening to Deep Purple on the iPod: what great music to drive to), where we have stopped in the hotel for the night. The hotel is cheap and cheerful (and the bar was closed when we went to investigate about half-past-nine), but the food here is wonderful. We recommend it heartily!

The cooling system in the car now appears watertight and we are confident of making it up to Alice Springs without any further problems. We are booked into The Mud Hut Motel in Coober Pedy for tomorrow night, which means an early start in the morning to catch up on the kilometres we should have covered today. We’re both looking forward to seeing this motel, though, particularly as we saw one of their 4x4s at a number of service stations (sorry Aussies, ‘Servos’) along the Nullarbor. From there, we’re off to see the biggest thing yet…