TripRoundUnder

Once done with the Great Ocean Road, we spent a hectic week and a half back home in Adelaide. Even though it had only been around a month since we had left, we had been missing home a little and especially the doggos. I think both sets of parents had also been missing us and it was nice to spend some quality time with them before we headed out west without a solid return date.

Serendipitously, the Adelaide Fringe was also taking place in Adelaide and we had a lovely night out with some of our friends seeing a pretty crazy magic show. It was nice to see our friends as we really couldn’t be certain the next time we would meet face to face!

Both sadly and happily, our time in Adelaide ended rather fast and in a pretty stressful manner for Steve, who managed to sell his car on our last day while driving out of the city. Nothing against used car salesmen, but I think we have had enough of dealing with them for quite a while.

We were finally on the road, this time without a return date and as I said previously, this was both exciting and a little scary. Exciting, as this really felt like the beginning of the proper adventure, but a little scary as it really was driving into the great unknown. A few tears were shed, but really we couldn’t wait to start! A campground just outside Port Germain by the sea seemed like a good place to have our first night, but a massive goods train rudely interrupted our sleep around 4am. In hindsight, probably shouldn’t complain when you camp right near train tracks…

From here, we continued our way up the coast to Port Augusta via a brief unsuccessful fish at the Port Germain jetty. This was an idea brought on by Steve’s dad who told us that the end of the jetty was great for fishing, only problem was… the end of the jetty was closed. Oh well, hopefully more fish to come! We really weren’t keen to see much of this area as we had driven through multiple times, so we pushed past Port Augusta and descended down into the much more exciting (to us) Eyre Peninsula.

We decided on a campsite close to the town of Port Neil and following advice on Wikicamps (a great resource, sponsor us please) that to avoid the wind camp by the sand dunes. Well, the advice may have been good on some days, but holy moly did we have one of the windiest nights of the trip so far!

Leaving the wind capital of South Australia, it was on to Port Lincoln! A place pretty special to Lauren as she had spent months here on placement for her nursing degree and had really fallen in love with the area. We booked a spot at the local caravan park and in true Steve and Lauren style found a winery and brewery to visit. Promise we’re not alcoholics!

Again staying true to form, we also managed to find an animal sanctuary just out of time and I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Steve was in animal lover heaven! I think the rabbits were especially happy to see us and even happier for the snacks that we brought!

Getting back outdoors, we made our way into the Port Lincoln National Park to some of Lauren’s favourite spots. Again, the windy weather had followed us down the peninsula, but we were still able to see beautiful coastline and it’s special beaches. We also managed to even do a little bit of 4×4 driving for the first time, with some of the roads in the park being a little “bumpy”. Proud to say that we did not get stuck and nothing broke on the troopy. Although we didn’t do the sand dune drive through the national park, we did go and check them out and had some fun running down the dunes and generally getting pretty sandy!

We did have a small issue on our last night in the town, which probably overtook Port Neil for the windiest night of the trip. In the middle of the night we were genuinely worried that the wind might damage the pop top of the troop, so we got outside and tried to pull it down to sleep on the ground floor. The only problem was that one of the latches that held down the roof snapped… Not the best timing when you don’t have many tools on board! So, after an uncomfortable night downstairs, we very slowly drove to Bunnings and added a rivet gun to our tool collection and managed to rivet the clamp back on (definitely didn’t struggle to do it at all…). Very happy with our work, we labelled ourselves “experienced tradies” and moved on.