Head for the Hills

We packed up, a few had more showers, then we drove out of Adelaide south east into the hills.   We passed some old hotels,  stone with wooden balconies, and drove through a tunnel through the hill.  We stopped in Hahndorf, the oldest German settlement in Australia,  and walked around the cute old buildings, past the German bakery, the German health food shop and the German coffee house.  We went and looked in the Hahndorf candle making shop, full of fat candles and spinning wooden advent carousels.  The ones with candles down the bottom and helicopter blades up the top, and tiers of wise men or shepherds hand carved out of wood .  There were hundreds, and they were worth hundreds of dollars.  I held on to Cooper very tightly.

A young lady was dipping candles into wax in the corner, and she let all our children make a rainbow candle by dipping it into different colours of wax.  That was very kind of her.

On we drove through hills of grassland, dry and brown right now, but I'm sure it's green and lovely in the growing season.   SA is the driest state in Australia, with an annual rainfall of 400mm.  Farming involves moving a lot of irrigation pipes.

We arrived in Strathalbyn about midday, to stay on the front footpath  of friends Ross and Val's house.  We all went to the  same church about 9 years ago when Ross and Val were in Brisbane.  It's really great to catch up with them again, and reintroduce ourselves to their three children who have grown a bit taller in that time!  Strathalbyn is Val's hometown, and in fact her family were pretty much the first settlers here in the 1840s and were instrumental in developing the area.  We were staying with the royal family!

We watched Red Dog the movie, walked down to town and back, staying away  from the cranky pony in someone's  front yard.  I twisted my ankle, but made it back home again, praise the Lord!  Strathalbyn is a lovely town, with old buildings and new buildings all mixed in.  It is the antique capital of South Australia, and had one particularly beautiful old church (among several), which Val grew up going to and  was married in.

We had a lovely afternoon visiting, looking at Val's vege garden (I really want to start one when I get home) and making jam out of the very ripe apricots off Val's tree.  In fact, that took Val until midnight!  Happy new year.

 

 

 

 

 

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Vicki

Adelaide City

Croissants for breakfast.  I missed out on getting them for Christmas, so it was nice having them today.

Once we organised ourselves, we drove into the city of Adelaide.  It has an amazing set out, circled by a park, and the streets set out in a grid.  Apparently the city was designed by the same man who set out Christchurch in New Zealand, Col. Light.  Parking about 3km from the centre was easy because it was a low key work week.  There are lots of old buildings and houses.  Beautiful. (I don’t like to say it but I think the original town planning was a lot better than Brisbane’s – Grant)

We walked along through the park around the city, stopping in at the Japanese garden built there, a gift from their sister city Himeji.  Japanese gardens are always neat, ordered and peaceful.  There were enormous  goldfish swimming in the pond under the lilly pads.  It was a very calm and cool spot in amongst the dry heat of the day.

We caught the tram the last part of the way.  It was an electric tram just like we used to ride in Germany 12 years ago.  Sitting in the air-conditioning was bliss.

  

We visited the museum and saw lots of preserved animals. Katie was fascinated by the parasites, one of which bit the tongue out of it's host fish, attached itself to the stump of the tongue, then waited for first bite of anything that came in the fish's mouth. Ugh.

There was a big bottle of round worms that were taken out of a human's stomach. Disgusting.

A giant squid display took up three floors of one of their elevators.  On the top floor was a glass panel through which you could view the whole squid hanging down to the ground, but Cooper wouldn't let anyone stand on that because it might break.

A baby porcupine is called a puggle.  It grows in a temporary pouch but is kicked out when it starts to grow spikes...

We looked at the display on the Mawson expedition to map the unexplored part of Antarctica below South Australia.  As part of the expedition, Sir Douglas Mawson led a sled party with two other guys, to the far east of their main base, and during their trek, the other two died.  One fell down a crevasse with a full sled of supplies and the strongest dogs, and the other, Mertz, died in a delerium after he and Mawson ate the remaining sled dogs to survive.  I understand that Mertz was a vegetarian and found the dog meat very tough, so he ate more of the liver, which gave him vitamin A poisoning.  It was an incredible feat of survival for Mawson to make it back to base camp alone.

(Dominic and I really enjoyed a closeup look at a current space suit.  Adelaide born Andy Thomas used it on his 1998 Mir Space Station Visit.  It looks like it would cost a fortune and looks like it provides far greater movement than the earlier space suits – Grant)

Cooper managed to pee on one of the museum chairs while he was engrossed in an interactive computer screen.  I cleaned it up as best I could...I probably should have told a security guard roaming that floor, but I was too scared.   We just beat a hasty retreat.

 

It was very hot today.  By the time we all walked through the mall, caught the tram back to near our car, then walked the long three blocks to the parking spot we were had it.

We didn't have the time or the energy to visit any of the beaches on the other side of Adelaide, but never mind.

Back to the van, more showers (oh, we just love these hot showers!) and late to bed.
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Vicki

On to Adelaide

The view from the look out was not as spectacular in the morning  as it was last night.  It was still a lovely view of the rolling hills, and the Spencer Gulf, but the sunset last night was amazing.

We wended our way slowly south, passing through the town of Laura, the home of CJ Dennis for much of his life, (CJ Dennis is a famous Australian poet.  He wrote 'the sentimental bloke' among other things), as well as the home of the Golden North ice cream factory.

The whole countryside was rolling hills of brown wheat or barley stubble, or brown grass for sheep to graze on.  I'm surprised at how few trees there are, it looks very bare in some places.

 

We regularly passed six-packs of silos, some tall and skinny, and a few pairs of short and fat ones.  All white, and standing out amongst the brown fields. 

The towns are full of old stone buildings, neglected in some instances with no roof  or boarded up windows and doors, and some others just very old.  Some of the towns are picturesque, but some just look dusty and tired, and you wonder why anyone is still there.  South Australia is the driest state in Australia.

We passed a whole pile of foxes strung on a fence.  I think the feral foxes are a big pest down here.

We stopped at Snowtown (named after someone's secretary) for lunch.  We were right beside the train tracks and saw a few long trains go past.  Grant and Dominic looked at the display of one blade from a wind generator.  It was huge, about 42 metres long. (Grant – I was really impressed with how big these things are.  I did some quick maths with everyone that showed that the tip of the blade would travel at 265 km/hour in a 43 km/hr wind.  No wonder they are so noisy!  For those interested, the diameter of the area the blades swing is 88 meters.  They generate 2 MegaWatts of power in winds above 43km/hr and they keep the speed down to 16 revolutions per minute by rotating the blades.  They shut down at wind speeds above 90km/hr.)

We passed the turnoff to Dublin.  Thought that was in Ireland!

Port Wakefield was the gateway to the Yorke peninsula.  It had five petrol stations right next to each other, and that was the whole town!  However we are not going down the Yorke peninsula so we kept driving south.

Coming into Adelaide we passed so many old stone houses, and old buildings.  We navigated our way through traffic and down narrow streets and twisty round-a-bouts.  The old houses are lovely.

We arrived at the caravan park in Windsor Gardens around four o'clock.  Straight away we washed three loads of washing and they were dry by 9pm.  We all had a shower, bliss, and flushing toilets!  Oh it's lovely.

We're right beside a very narrow part of the Torrens, the river that runs through Adelaide.  We could (but we didn't) walk the 7km into town along the bike track.  The caravan park is lovely and quiet, but when I went out for groceries there were quite a few cruising young guys in hotted up cars. (Ross told us that the crime rate was very high in the area over 10 years ago when he worked as a policeman.  Glad we learnt about that later – Grant)

Dominic, Nadine and Oskar had a great time playing on the grass behind the caravan, it's been a long time since they saw any that was worth rolling on.

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Vicki

Port Augusta

Tonight we are parked on top of the world...well, that's what it feels like.  We have stopped at Hancock's Lookout, just south of Port Augusta and up the ? range.  We are looking down into the Spencer gulf and it's beautiful.   We arrived as the sun was sinking in the west and the colours changed on the hillsides and the water was shining... 

Up here also is another van with their generator running, and Mario from
Slovakia.  He is working and studying in Sydney and told his friends he was just going for a drive for a few days over Christmas...they are probably wondering where he got to.  He is enamored with the stars. He says you can't see the stars in Europe (I'll have to take his word for that) or in Sydney.  So when he first saw the milky way he was blown away.  I told him I thought God had put on a pretty good show for us.

This morning we said goodbye to Tony and Val when they headed into Port Lincoln, then we finished stowing everything into the van and headed north.  We passed Tumby Bay and Port Neill, and had lunch at Red Banks overlooking Arno Bay which was very windy.  Next we drove up through Cowell, a lovely old town, and Whyalla which is home of the Onesteel factory.  It was only a bit further up the road to Port Augusta and the narrow tip of the Spencer gulf that is the body of water between the Eyre peninsula that we have been on, and the York peninsula to the east.

In Port Augusta we rushed to the Mitre 10 to fill up our two gas bottles before the shop closed.  The second one had run out last night, leaving our fridge and stove very quiet for a night!   We actually used our spare cooker that we've carried the whole trip for the first time to heat up the water for the washing up.  Yet another thing we'd probably leave behind next time.

Once we had the two bottles filled,  we back tracked a little to climb up the Port Augusta water tower to have a good view over the city.  Water towers hold a special fascination for us since Dominic studied the book, 'the watertower' by Gary Crew this term in English.  We actually got to go inside this one, and as I emerged from the final staircase into the tank, I heard Nadine carefully reading out some of the graffiti scrawled across the inside – not very pleasant!

We stopped for dinner on our way out of Port Augusta, then drove a further 40km or so south, and up the most amazing hills, or mountains really, that looked like folded velvet on one side of the Spencer gulf.   I think they are the Southern Flinders Ranges and we have camped on the top of them, and it's lovely.

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Vicki

Twas the day after the day after Christmas

Another lovely rest day.  There are a few more people trickling into the camping area, but it is not the massive crush I thought it might be.

Grant and Joseph headed off on a walk this morning, while the rest of us straightened up the van, did the dishes, and played rummykub.  A kangaroo got very interested in our rubbish bin at one point, and when I tried to scare him/her away, she jumped back with her head and one arm still caught in the swing lid top of the bin.  It took her a little while to wiggle herself out of the bin lid and hop away.

Bacon and egg sandwiches, with beetroot and lettuce etc, were very yummy for lunch, then we all headed off to see what walk Grant and Joseph had done in the morning.

Up Stamford Hill we climbed, over multiple ant colonies that were very aggressive when disturbed.  We reached the summit for a lovely view of Boston Bay, and also to see the memorial to Matthew Flinders who came in 1802 to survey the coast.  He seemed to search for fresh water all along the coast around here. 

Back at Surfleet cove we played on the beach, it was too cold to swim, then had fish for dinner, followed by mulberries from some bushes around the campground.  We had a nice chat with Tony and Val, telling them all our worst jokes, before heading off to bed.
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Vicki

Boxing Day

Boxing Day.  We slept in, ate ham and cheese toasted sandwiches for lunch, and explored the park this afternoon.  It was overcast and cold again today, not the best weather for swimming!  I assure everyone, Grant has been here the whole time and hasn't ducked off to Darwin to make any trouble.

All the children are desperate to get home.  For them, Christmas has always been playing with cousins and visiting friends, so they are missing everyone.

The other side of the bay we’re camped on  has lovely beaches, then the eastern side of that cape has Donnington Lighthouse, September Beach and other rocky outcrops.   We camped where we are to be more sheltered from the wind, and I think it's one of the nicer spots, with a small shady beach as well.

It was around this peninsula in about 1806 that Matthew Flinders mapped the coast in a rotting, leaking boat called the Investigator.  He sent eight men to look for water, two officers and six crew, in a little cutter, and bad weather blew up and killed them all.  Eight islands off the coast are named after them.

Joseph had post-Christmas-itis today, with some up and down moments  ...later this afternoon he came out with his yo-yo, throwing it out straight in front of him, then catching it as it spun back towards him.  "I always try to throw it towards Dad," he said "in case the string breaks...".  We all thought that was pretty funny.

Tony and Val came down after tea and we swapped Banjo Paterson poems.  We told him 'the man from Ironbark', and he told us 'Mulga Bill's Bicycle', and  'We'll all be roon'd said Hanrahan'.  We had a great time.

I'm finding it tricky being light so late.  I don't really watch the clock, but before I know it it's 9pm and still light, and we have a mad rush to get everyone into bed.  Then they all sleep in the next morning because I pull all the curtains in the van closed, so it's dark inside while outside the sun is up and shining - we're not really taking advantage of daylight saving at all!

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Vicki

Christmas Day

Merry Christmas Everyone!

We didn't make the 90km round trip into Port Lincoln for a Christmas service this morning.  We decided to stay here and chat to Tony and Val instead.

Present opening, breakfast, and reading some great books took up the day.  Two books about two different boys who both went to heaven and came back were very inspiring. Heaven is for Real and The boy who came back from Heaven.

We opened some lovely presents from family in Brisbane, and the children had each prepared a secret santa gift for each other, so the van soon filled up with wrapping paper and opened packing.  I went back to bed to read!

It was a cold and overcast old day, though.  Perfect for reading.  I managed to drag myself away long  enough to cook a roast lamb in the frypan and boiled vegetables for lunch.  We had Christmas crackers, but that was as festive as we got.

Late in the afternoon we went for a walk around the bay.  It is light until after 9pm which makes it hard for going to bed!

I think everyone had a lovely, restful Christmas.

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Vicki

Port Lincoln

This morning started off overcast and a bit rainy, but it soon cleared to blue skies and fluffy white clouds sitting above Boston Bay.

Christmas is almost here, and don't we know it.  Children leaping onto beds and off the ceiling.  Mum losing it and screaming at everyone that she'll take away all the Christmas presents if they don't behave. Crazy stuff.  Even in a caravan!

We drove into Port Lincoln this morning for a look around and some last minute shopping.  We had a lovely time wandering through the town, and just as Oskar's sandals fell apart, we passed target so went in a got him another pair.  What timing.

Port Lincoln has a population of 20,000 that doubles when they hold their annual Tuna festival.  No prizes for guessing what type of fish you can catch around Port Lincoln.

There were a number of old buildings, but our main goal today was to have a rest, we are all very tired from five days of long driving, and the build up to Christmas is fraying everyone's nerves.  We sat for a bit in McDonalds (we seem to visit a bit, but anywhere else would cost us a fortune to eat), and in the end we returned to our caravan much more cheerful than when we'd left.

The last stop on our way out of town was the laundromat.  We're getting very good at this laundromat thing, and this one even had a video running.  We couldn't get the kids to leave once the load had finished.  Dominic spotted Tony and Val going past in their distinctive motorhome, and we rang to see if he was right.  They have driven all the way down here to have Christmas with us.  The kids were very glad. (so were we).

I dug out the Christmas stockings that I've carted around for three months, and the children got very excited.  Joseph and Dominic trained Cooper how to check it for presents.  They told him to close his eyes, then they put some of his toys in and told him they were ready.  He was so excited every time he found his old toys in the stocking.

Later in the afternoon we headed down to our shady little beach, had a rest on the sand while the kids jumped in and out of the shallow water.  Very peaceful.  We had dinner, a special one because it was Christmas Eve, remembering our family who would be having their traditional Christmas Eve celebration.  We had wombok salad anyway, even if we couldn't be there.  It was starting to feel a bit more like Christmas.

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Vicki

South on the Eyre Peninsula

Struggling awake this morning, two and a half hours earlier than Western Australian time, we packed up the van yet again.  We've decided we need to find a more sheltered site for Christmas, and Grant was determined to get us moving.  I sent Joseph across the road to the beach with a red bucket, just to see what the birds would do, and he was swooped by some seagulls, eyed by some ospreys, but it was when a big pelican skidded across the water in front of him that he decided he'd better come back while he could.

On the way south along the Flinders Highway we took a small detour to Murphy's Haystacks, a group of rocks sticking out of the ground.  The name came because a farming expert, driving in a carriage a distance away, pointed out these rocks as a great example of how to correctly make hay.  The owner of the land was Murphy, hence Murphy's haystacks. 

Eyre Peninsula is full of grazing lands, and fields that look like they recently held wheat.  In places there are very few trees.  We drove south past Anxious Bay and Mt Misery to Coffin Bay on the other side of which is Perforated Island and Avoid Bay (sounds like Matthew Flinders had a great trip in 1802 mapping this coast).  Next we went across to Port Lincoln on the east side of the peninsula, and then out to Lincoln National Park.

We are camped in Surfleet campground, having pulled into the last spot near to the beach.  There are only 6 spots so it doesn't feel crowded, and the others all look like grey nomads...I was hoping for a few kids for ours to play with, but we'll see.   There is a shallow bay with lovely water, and some very pushy kangaroos that look like they are used to being fed. We had to scare one away from the door of our van when he seemed to want to come inside.

We had a lovely swim, a shower that Grant hooked up for us, dinner a bit earlier than last night, then pulled all the curtains and closed the van up to get everyone into bed a bit earlier.  The daylight saving means it's light until 9.30pm, a bit too late for everyone here, and we are having a bit of car lag again from our change in time zones.

We think we need a bit of a rest from driving, so we're stopping here over Christmas.  Grant wants to stay to for five nights, but that seems too long to me, so we'll see how we go.

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Vicki