We didn’t get up until 8.30am on Sunday morning and after giving the doggies a quick run on the local oval and breakfast we drove to the ruined township of Hampton. The countryside along the way was beautiful with huge golden rolling hills of harvested wheat, groups of scented shady pine trees and loads of Galahs ducking and weaving in front of the van.
The town of Hampton was founded by Thomas Powell in 1857 and named after the home town of his wife in England. It was modelled on an English village and home to 30 miners’ cottages and a chapel. Nearby was a stone quarry which supplied the stone for many of the homes in Burra. The little village was virtually abandoned in the 1920’s except for one person living there until the 1960’s. We really enjoyed walking through the partial ruins of the cottages and their overgrown gardens with pine and olive trees, and imagining how it must have looked. There was long grass all around and I got a bit nervous of snakes, especially after Paul found a shed snake skin on the ground that looked enormous!
We drove back to Burra and stopped at Redruth Gaol, the first gaol in South Australia outside of Adelaide. It was built in 1856 and was home to 30 male and female prisoners. In 1897 it became a girls’ reformatory and closed in 1922. Now the National Trust looks after it. We used our special passport key purchased from the Information Office to get inside and look around. Punishments were very tough in those days and a couple of months in gaol just for breaking a window were common. We discovered that the gaol was the setting for the famous movie ‘Breaker Morant’. So now we want to see that movie again and Picnic at Hanging Rock as we have seen both ‘film sets’ in the last couple of days.
After a stroll through Burra again and a leisurely lunch we picked a stop about half-way to Adelaide for the night – a tiny town called Tarlee. We struggled to find the rest area which was in our Camps 5 book and had to ask at the local pub – it was between the Catholic Church, the local oval and the Institute building, next to a field of sheep!
We continued our relaxed journey to Adelaide stopping briefly at Gawler to pick up some groceries and fuel. Then we set Lee (our GPS) on to Largs Bay, which is north-west of Adelaide city centre and on the beach. Paul had been there on business and wanted me to see the place. It was very beautiful with sandy shores, a long jetty and shallow warm turquoise water. Tia had a fantastic time on the beach with her tennis ball and then Paul and I had a lovely lunch at the Largs Pier Hotel on the front – seafood platter and roasted vegetable pizza with a glass each of local sauvignon blanc.
After lunch ‘Lee’ directed us to the caravan park at Windsor Gardens that we had booked for the next two nights. It was a pet friendly park and not too far from where the van was to have its 150,000km service the next day. We had booked ahead as there is always a shortage of ‘pet friendly’ parks close to cities and true to form, Windsor Gardens had a little dog of some sort tied up outside nearly every caravan. This made it a little fraught each time we went for a walk and had to run the gauntlet past all the territories of the other doggies. However there was a lovely walk and cycle path along the Torrens River right at the back of the caravan park that ran for 40kms or so, and we were able to do a little bit of that one evening.
We arrived at the KEA motor home service centre before 8.00am having successfully navigated around Adelaide with the help of ‘Lee’. Fortunately the service centre was next to a nice shady park where we could wait for most of the day while the work was being done on the van. There was a large shopping centre across the road and a MacDonald’s (good for coffees and toilets) next to the park. So whilst it was difficult being without our “home”, especially in hot weather and with the dogs, we made the best of it and read and did puzzles and relaxed.
We had to do the same journey the next day as the van service wasn’t finished and new break pads still needed to be fitted. We had also given KEA a long list of other little items that needed rectifying inside and outside, such as lights not working, air-con vents broken and a new external aerial socket to be supplied. It was great to get all these things seen to and so we bore the hanging around with stoicism!
All was finished by lunch time and we were keen to get away from the Adelaide traffic and so we set course for Strathalbyn about 60kms south-east. Paul was driving and we somehow ended up doing a detour through the Adelaide Hills on some very windy, narrow and hilly bumpy roads until the new break pads smelt like they were on fire and I threw a wobbly. Paul had the sense to stop and we turned back on to our original course after some strong words from the stressed and slightly nauseated passengers in the back...
We changed drivers in Mount Barker and made it safely and without further discomfort to Strathalbyn – a town full of antique shops and a swimming pool that sadly closed at 5.00pm. So we had a drink to cool down in the local pub and then drove on a few more kilometres to a spot for the night at a rest area called Frank Potts Reserve in the Langhorne Creek wine area. It was a lovely shady and grassy area surrounded by acres of green vineyards and fields of turf. We ate dinner at the pub which was a short walk away – a vegetable Schnitzel and a seafood platter with some local wine. The evening was quite cool and we almost wished we had bought a sweatshirt with us as we sat outside with the doggies.
We chatted to a lady called Carol who worked in the local Angus Plains Estate winery and we promised we would call in for a lunch platter and wine tasting the next day.
We had decided to give the van a bit of a spring clean the next morning and just as we finished, Sue, a lady travelling by herself in a motor home came over for a chat. We also had a talk to a Belgium backpacker visitor who wanted some boiled water for tea, so it became quite the social spot to be. Whilst all this was going on, Paul decided to hang up a fly strip inside the van, but forgot to close the doors and windows, so when we climbed back into the van half an hour later, it was buzzing with approximately 200 flies... YUK. I removed the fly strip and Paul had the task of emptying the van of flies and re-cleaning all the surfaces that we had just spring cleaned. Oh dear – not happy Jan.
Anyway we cheered up and invited Sue to come with us for lunch at the Angus Plains winery. We drove there in our van with Sue and doggies onboard and had a lovely long lunch out on the veranda. It was very hot and the owner kindly put out some electric fans for us whilst we shared a cheese platter and prawn stir-fry along with some Angus Plains wine. Sue was fun and the conversation lively, and as we were the only ones there, even Carol had a chance to join in.
By the time we got back to the Frank Potts rest area it was 5.00pm, so the dogs got fed and we did a short walk before dark.
We moved off late the next morning after a short walk to the local cemetery. We also discovered what the bad smell that wafted around our van was – a dead fox in the early stages of putrifaction on the grass verge nearby...yuk! We arrived back in Strathalbyn for a better exploration and to do a few chores: buy some more of Tia’s specialist dog food at the vets, Financial Review newspaper for Paul and some food shopping. We also called into the Information Centre and got a big map and brochure for the next leg of our journey down the Limestone Coast to Mount Gambia.
For more than 25 million years, the Limestone Coast consisted of a series of ancient coastlines submerged beneath the Southern Ocean. During this period, tonnes of marine crustaceans fell to the sea floor to form the soft porous rock known as limestone. When the sea retreated one million years ago, it left a series of caves and sinkholes along with soil that has created a region famous for wineries and agriculture. White settlers didn’t arrive until 1840 and they established vast pastoral holdings and stations.
We decided to take the road down the coast rather than inland, but the initial part of the journey from Strathalbyn to Meningie reminded us of our travels in the Northern Territories down the centre of Australia. The landscape was just dry scrub with salt pans and so hot. We were very surprised it was so very dry looking. We did get the free ferry across the mighty Murray River at Wellington which runs every 15 minutes, and we headed south around Lake Alexandria to stop for the late afternoon and night at Meningie.
The Caravan Park there was right on the edge of the Lake, but we locked ourselves into the van with the air-con on until 8.00pm. Only then did we venture out for a walk on the salty and sandy Lake’s edge. Underneath the crusty surface of the shore was thick mud and silt, and the water was hot like a bath. Tia went in the water only once and sunk into the mud and we were worried she would need rescuing. She did managed to get out by herself, covered in dirt up to her arm-pits. The smell of the almost stagnant water was quite overpowering. The sunset was very beautiful changing from burning orange to pale pink across the lake and desolate landscape behind, but we were all too tired, hot and irritable to properly appreciate it.
Still the hot weather continued the next day and we knew we had to jump from Caravan park to Caravan park, so that we could have some electricity for air-conditioning inside the van for the afternoon. The temperature was well into the 40 degrees as we drove further south down the Limestone Coast to our next stop at Kingston. This town was on Lacepede Bay and it was very nice to actually be right on the coast rather than next to an almost dried out Lake. Kingston is home to the Big Lobster and Paul bravely jumped out of the van for a few seconds to take a photo! It is also famous for a fantastic fish and chip shop named South Australia’s best and is great for holiday makers who want to fish, scuba dive, sail and swim.
We grabbed the very last powered spot in the Kingston Caravan Park and breathed a sigh of relief at how lucky we were – everyone wanted power and no-one wanted to free camping in temperatures like that. We put the air-con on full and tackled some emails, bills and photo downloads whilst we waiting for the temperature outside to drop. The dogs were happy to lie on the cool floor and sleep and Tia had the additional luxury of a soaked bandana around her neck.
