With that in mind, we set off today with one objective and that was to make the journey to Adelaide as quick and painless as possible. It is 570km journey, but route finding isn't difficult and traffic, by both UK and French standards, light. The majority of the road is two lane highway and a maximum speed of 100kph (62mph) in Victoria and 110kph (68mph) in South Australia. Once again, we encountered many 'road trains' that drive at the same speed as the cars, they can be quite intimidating.
The first stretch took us to Heywood and then on to Mount Gambier. Just to the east of Mount Gambier at Rennick, we left Victoria and entered South Australia. We stopped in Mount Gambier for a coffee and got a time check from the girl serving drinks and set our watches back by 30 minutes. We are now only 10 1/2 hours ahead of UK time! Weird! I don't think I've ever been in a time zone that is 30 minutes different.
The next stretch of road, about 160km took us through sparsely populated farming country to Kingston SE. Almost the entire length of the road was completely flat and much of it dead straight, some stretches as much as 11km without even a slight bend.
At Kingston, as it was lunchtime, we found a coffee shop and had some sandwiches whilst sitting outside. The town was a very sleepy place and I imagine that cray fishing is important judging from the giant Crayfish sculpture on the edge of town.
We could see on the map that the next 200km would follow the coast although we couldn't see it as it was behind gigantic sand dunes. We got moving up the road and as there was virtually no traffic, were cruising at 110kph. As we came round a bend about 60km up the coast, we saw a camper van beside the road and could see its front was damaged and the occupants stood by the roadside. We stopped to see if they were OK and they told us they'd had an encounter with two kangaroos, they'd managed to miss the first one, but had hit and killed the second. The collision caused the damage,but the air bags had also gone off. The driver said it was like being punched in the chest. His female passenger, who had her feet up,on the dashboard at the time had scratches all over her legs. They were phoning the rental company as we left after turning down our offer of a lift to civilisation. I hope they didn't have to wait too long for recovery.
The last bit of the journey from Tailem Bend was mostly on dual carriageway and after just over 7 hours, we were dropping down the steep hill into the edge of Adelaide. We are staying in Glenelg, a seaside suburb of the city in another Motel. This one is slightly larger than last nights, but is clean, quiet and comfortable too.
Most importantly, it has a guest laundry which was good as we were running out of clothes! After washing, we hung it out on the line to dry and went into the middle of Glenelg for dinner.
Lynn thought it has some similarities with Skegness, but there were a wide range of choices of food, some cheap and some quite expensive. We ate at the Hogs Breath Cafe. American in style, it is a chain, the food was quite good and reasonably priced.
A long drive, but interesting to see the huge, wildly isolated farms and big skies!
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