Coober Pedy and Kade's Birthday

Yesterday we spent the whole day driving and driving until we came to a rest stop for the night.  We also had an ice-cream.  You may remember in some of my very first entries, that I wrote about us searching for a South Australian only ice-cream called a Giant Twin.  Well as we were driving we stopped at a roadhouse and finally found them, here in the N.T.  So we bought some to put in the fridge and have later.  It was a honey flavoured ice-cream coated in a thin layer of chocolate and it was delicious.  After we had bought the ice-cream we crossed over into SA for the 2nd. time.  We also watched a movie called Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief.  

Today is Kade’s birthday.  We gave him his present, which has already included the helicopter ride over Uluru and the early birthday present we had given him a few weeks ago.  Then we had a short drive to Coober Pedy.  

As we approached Coober Pedy we saw thousands of large and small dirt mounds, belonging to places where miners have dug holes to find Opals.  A unique thing about Coober Pedy was that a lot of the the towns residents and shops lived underground.  The weather was so extreme that it was hard to live above ground.  In winter the temperature gets to -2 degrees, in summer it got up to 55 degrees and between those times it was very windy.  We first went to an underground opal gallery and display house to do a tour.  We walked into the side of a hill and found ourselves in a beautiful underground house.  We first watched a little clip about the discovery of Opals and then walked down into the mine where they had searched for the Opals themselves.  We walked through the first style of mine house underground and then through the modern day house.  I found learning about opal and the construction of the underground housing interesting.  

Then we drove to a Kangaroo Orphanage to have a feed of the kangaroos.  These people rescued animals and brought them here to be looked after.  We fed the 7 kangaroos which either had no mum since they were a baby or had been hurt in some way.  Then they brought out a baby 5 month old joey name Seamus that we patted.  We also softly blew into the joeys face because that was the way kangaroos greet each other and know whether they know each other or not.  When I blew into the face of the little joey it kissed me on the nose.  

Then after we said goodbye to adorable Seamus we drove to where we were going to camp for the night.  We were going to take our van to where we were staying but not sleep in it.  We were going to take our tents and go down and camp under ground.  It was weird to be setting up in the middle of the day but in darkness.  After we got over that we were going to sleep underground, we went to go and have dinner at a restaurant which was also underground to celebrate Kade’s 8th birthday.  We all had a delicious dinner and Sticky-Date Pudding for desert.