I had to remind myself where we left things with blog entries as it seems like forever ago that we made a post and we’ve done so much since, in reality it was only a week ago. Last we left things we’d just left the Great Ocean Road and were heading for Bendigo to see my sister Vanessa and her family. We made it to Bendigo no dramas and had a great stay with the Bakers. One of the days we did a trip into a place called Maldon and there happened to be an All British motorcycle rally on which suited this old school town brilliantly

Jason and Vanessa also took us for dinner onto the Cafe Tram 976 while we were in town. It’s a tram carriage that cruises around the town and serves a 4 course meal with local wines etc fully included. As you can imagine it got pretty rowdy so we hit up the karaoke place and a few clubs afterwards and had a lazy day on the Sunday. Overall a great stay and we left Bendigo realizing that it’s really not that far for us to drive to from Sydney so it needs to happen more often.

Leaving Bendigo we headed roughly for Adelaide but went Via the Grampians, which is a National Park not too far west of Bendigo and apparently is very popular for Victorian family and school group holidays as there’s loads walks to waterfalls and lookouts etc. We did a couple of walks up the Grand Canon and a few other places and did a bit of rock climbing without ropes and generally had a great time. Unfortunately again the rain was settling in for a few days so we only spent one night at the Grampians but could easily have spent more had the weather been better. We decided driving through the rain storms was much more bearable than sitting around a wet campsite so we set off and drove into the night to the Murray River just out of Adelaide. We also set out with the goal for this trip to spend the majority of time in the hardest to reach places such as WA, NT and the Red Center so it was fine to make good progress for this section.

The following day was still rainy and windy so we did a bit of site-seeing from the car down to Victor Harbour and then up through McLaren Vale and into Adelaide. We didn’t spend a lot of time in Adelaide but just drove around checking out Rundle Mall and the Botanical Gardens etc (for some reason we seem to always end up at botanic gardens of one form or another!) We spent the next couple of days cruising up into the Adelaide Hills through some great little towns such as Handorf (little Germany) and camped in a state forest and went out up through the Barossa Valley where we stopped and did some wine tasting (Jacobs Creek, Grant Burge, Penfolds, Wolf Blass) and had lunch at the Maggie Beer farmshop.

From there we went through another wine region, the Clare Valley and were going to spend the night at a place called White Cliffs, but it was average at best so we soldiered on right up and through Port Augusta and now find ourselves with camp setup in a paddock of a 400 square mile farm on the Eyre Highway with 25,000 sheep baaaa’ing next to us and the occasional road train rumble by! Tara has managed to fall asleep but I haven’t so much luck. At least it gives me a good chance to write a blog post I guess!

Anyway, that’s all for now. I’ve uploaded a few more pics to the Southern Vic page and also to the Southern SA photo page so be sure to check them out.

Also, I’ve been uploading some pics from my iPhone onto a page with a map to track our progress so if you haven’t done already, be sure to check that out. Note that it doesn’t send notifications when we update the pictures to that page so you’ll just have to check back on that page every now and then.

Dave