Archive for July, 2011

Day 3 – Adelaide (Hahndorf, McLaren Vale, Glenelg)


Our first non-travelling day today.  Also my first day of non-work, which was also SMS and call free … bet that won’t last!

The plan was to go and have a look at Hahndorf and then do a few wineries around McLaren Vale before heading back to the van, and we pretty well kept to that idea although we nearly got sidetracked a few times.

A geocache in the morning saw the kids amazed by their first micro geocache, a berocca container embedded in the side of the steps leading down to the beach.  It took a bit of finding, but was found on the morning walk.

Before the day got away from us, we headed up into the Adelaide Hills to Hahndorf, past Grumpy’s brewery while thinking of Al.  If I’d known it was a brewery at the time then we may not have gotten any further … but alas we cruised in to Hahndorf.  Blake had been really looking forward to it but was a little surprised by it in the end. He’s interested in his German heritage, but was bemused to find that that boils down to a love of sausage and beer. I’m sure he’ll come to embrace the beer at some stage. 🙂

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Day 2 – Adelaide

After a blustery night we awoke at 6:30 and packed up in the rain to get outta Mount Gambier at 8:30.  A quick refuel saw us heading towards Naracoorte.  Hmmm … not Robe … we were supposed to head to Robe.

Another day of hugging the coast with the wind and the rain wasn’t really appealing.  Meanwhile the brochure for the Naracoorte Caves was looking mighty good.  An almost inside activity in this weather seemed like a godsend.  So off we went…

Given that our fuel economy while driving manually and trying to stay around 100km/h was a little scary, I wanted to try out cruising at 80km/h as a comparo.  So … here we are plodding along at 80km/h when a fella in a land cruiser ute pulls alongside and makes some odd gestures at me.  I figure we’ve left the antenna up or a bed folded out or something stupid … we did get going in a hurry after all.  I pulled over not knowing quite what to expect … as does the cruiser driver …

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Day 1 – Mount Gambier

We’ve started!

Willie Nelson is the traditional way to start a trip in this family.  Something about being good luck.

Little sleep was had, despite a good start. Kel & I were both up at 5am fussing around. Kids got up around 6:30 and we got stuck into the final packing and locking up the house.

We actually got away right on 8am which was pretty good really. First day is always going to be the hardest.

First stop was Torquay to grab Blake’s geocoin. Kel snagged the opportunity to snatch the first photo of the rig all rearing to go. Its quite surreal and hasn’t sunk in yet that we are actually doing this. I suspect the Mount Gambier evening may sharpen up my senses somewhat. It was dropping below 9 at sunset and I shudder (damn straight I’ll be shuddering) to think of what the minimum will be.

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Well, the time has come!

No more sleeps to save us from the future.  The wait is over.

Tomorrow we ride!  Our trusty steed (the Prado) will drag our faithful chariot (the Expanda) off across the wide brown land in search of the best beaches, campsites, coldest beers and fiestiest Barramundi.

Tonight we had a round table (well square, but that’s enough nit-picking) discussion about the future.  There’s just so much happening while we’re gone……

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