After being on Yorke Peninsula for a few days, it was time to move on.
We would have loved to have stay longer but because of the school holidays, we were time-poor, so maybe next time.
When everyone was up, we packed the van and headed off.
It was a big day of driving.
We bypassed Adelaide and ended up in the hills of the Barossa area, stopping at one of the dams that had a ‘whispering wall’.
We hadn’t heard of it before, so the kids were intrigued with being able to whisper into the pipe and have people over on the other side hear what they had said.
From there, it was on to Murray Bridge, where at about 6.30pm we found a lovely free camp on a high bank overlooking the Murray River.
The river was starting to rise from upstream floodwaters, and it had a good fast flow.
We spent some time birding and looking for insects, then sat and watched the sunset over the Murray River with a big dairy farm in the background.
Slightly after dark, I heard a bird over the embankment and went to see what it was, as I didn’t recognise the call.
I couldn’t find the bird but did find a big hole in the bank. I peered in and saw a wombat’s butt!
As the only other wombats we had seen on the trip were roadkill, I went back to camp, grabbed my camera and torch and told everyone about my great find.
I went back and shone the torch in, then retreated super quickly.
There was no wombat, but there was a humungous swarm of bees!
The next day we were up and away, headed for the Coorong area, past Lake Alexandrina – which is massive, there were 40’ boats sailing on it.
Then over to Narrung on the free river ferry – what a pretty little town and area.
From there, it was on to Kartoo Rd, which runs along other lakes and the Coorong National Park area – with many kilometres of camping spots.
We checked out a few of the camp spots, and while we were steadily poking along the road, we came to a brown sand patch about 50m long.
I pulled up and walked it, thinking we’d be able to get through without dropping the tyres – alas no.
I had to air down to 12psi on the four-wheel-drive and caravan, and then we were able to drive out easily.
While I was bogged, an Isuzu 4WD 4.5 tonne small truck towing a tandem trailer had to wait.
He came to ask if we were fine, I said we should be.
Anyway, we got out, so I pulled up to see if he would get through.
No – bogged to the diffs at the same place we got stuck.
I turned the 4WD around and parked it to give him a point to winch off because there were no trees anywhere.
Lucky he had a big winch, as his front hubs were not working, so he winched off our Toyota 80 Series and drove in two-wheel-drive mode to get through.
We saw only one other vehicle on the entire drive in this area, so luckily we waited to make sure the other driver got through.
After that, we pumped the six tyres up and made our way to Meningie on Yarli (previously known as Lake Albert), stopping for delicious goodies at the bakery – which took longer than pumping the tyres up.
We explored the foreshore and headed on, ending up at The Granites. We were going to stay overnight at the free camp but it was blowing a gale and the bitumen carpark and overnight area were incredibly hot.
We explored the beach and rock formations – a beautiful long beach with hard sand that you could drive on for kilometres.
We moved on to Kingston SE, where we drove up a gravel country road and found a free camp for the night, on a crossroad out of the dust.
We had just finished setting the van up when a local farmer came along on his quad bike.
He pulled up to see if we were OK. We said we were and thank you for stopping.
I asked if it was fine to stay where we were overnight and he said it was fine, then we got chatting for about 30 minutes.
You meet a lot of interesting people on your travels – it’s lovely.
The next day we made our way to Mount Gambier.
Until next month, be safe on our roads.
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