Post #3 - Naracoorte to Mt Gambier

Did someone say ‘where are you going?’

Blog number three continuing on Monday, 8 April at Naracoorte with Ellis who drove us around his district in the rain and showed us the property that he had sold when he retired, proudly telling us it had the biggest Redgum in the whole of South Australia. It was enormous and it would’ve held half a dozen people in the hollow bowl. 

 

Ellis had a kelpie about eight months old, called Dusty, who was absolutely delightful and full of energy. Apparently Dusty was very interested in watching the ‘Muster Dogs’ program on the television and kept investigating behind the screen to find the dogs. 

The evening meeting to a small group (about 12) was held in the public area of a local pub restaurant and there was no microphone available. Not ideal! Their president Elisabeth is the editor/reporter/photographer of a string of rural local papers so we may get some welcome publicity.

Red gum giant (the one on the left)

 

On Tuesday 9th we set off for Mount Gambier, 102 km, which seemed a slightly daunting as we had to follow the main road because the alternatives were much longer and were gravel roads. The A66 is very busy with a lot of heavy truck traffic and the shoulder of the road was not always wide enough so we were blown off the bitumen a couple of times by big trucks. Not a serious threat but certainly enough to un-nerve us. 

Bl@ck boys aka Xanthorrhoea - don’t think that name will catch on

 We were travelling through the well-known Coonawarra wine district, and passed a lot of famous wineries along there until we got to Penola, where we stopped briefly for lunch before continuing through another wine area called Wrattonbully to Tarpeena. The whole day we battled a headwind of about 25 km an hour and, in combination with the distance, it was really quite sapping, Arriving in Tarpeena we phoned up our hosts for the night Brian and Jan to give them an estimated time of arrival and they kindly offered to pick us up but we declined and soldiered on without a murmur of dissent from the back seat. 

These bottles were lying on the surface, so I’m assuming that this migration is in recent time otherwise they’d have been buried under a stratum of Blue Nun bottles and Winfield fag packets, Winfield fag packets. 

 

A signpost indicated the road to Dismal Swamp and this struck a chord with us because there’s a Dismal Swamp in Tasmania, too, which is far and away more dismal. Cycling, as we do, along the road shoulder, we get a grandstand view of litter and debris and noticed a sight all too reminiscent of our Nullarbor trip. Some of you may have read in the Nullarbor blog that there were thousands of plastic bottles along the side of the roadside there and nearly all them were 2/3 full with what I naïvely thought was Liptons iced tea (being straw coloured liquid). Joyce patiently explained that it wasn’t actually iced tea, it was urine and these were tossed out by drivers who either couldn’t stop because they were driving a gigantic truck or were too idle to stop. Well, it appears that Homo Nullarboriensis is now undertaking a southern migration. Liptons iced tea is showing up on verges on the A66. Not sure if we should be afraid.

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