Barossa Valley Holiday Park, Nuriootpa, South Australia. 1905km
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Australian word of the day: Cellar Door – An on location winery shop where you can get a taste or two.
We got lucky on Friday and had a few dry hours during the day. Our first order of business was to get the children outside. Happily just a 2 minute drive from the campground was a huge park with tons of climbing sliding and swinging activities for tots. I ran after the kids with a towel to dry off the bottoms of slides from the night’s rain. After 2 hours of exercise we stopped in the local supermarket, bakery, butcher and fish store to stock up on supplies. We had a nice B-B-Q supper at the campground kitchen.
Early Saturday morning the rain resumed and would not stop for 36 hours.
We decided to cover some mileage instead of waiting another day on the great ocean road for the weather to clear. We drove along the southern coast road through Nelson and then crossed the border to a new province for us, South Australia. The drive was wet and lonely, there were barely any cars on the road. We drove by long stretches of pine forest, which seemed out of place to us here in Australia. We later learned that this is a California species that has adapted very well to the climate here and is used by the local lumber industry. A nice surprise along the way were 2 wild emus that we spotted while driving along. Although we slowed down, they ran away rather quickly.
Just after we entered South Australia, we stopped for lunch at Piccaninnie Ponds, a natural reserve near the ocean. It was cold and windy and drizzly so we stayed in the RV for lunch. An hour later we reached Mount Gambier and our campground, checked into a site and could not walk out of the RV it was raining so hard. Mount Gambier is a city of 20,000 named after the mountain it sits on and near. The mountain is an extinct volcano with an exceptionally blue lake occupying its crater.
It kept raining all afternoon and we were hard pressed to entertain the kids. They practiced drawing shapes, did some coloring books, watched a movie, read books, and tested the limits of our sanity.
On Sunday morning it was still raining and we decided to find an indoor activity for the children somewhere in town. We drove to the visitor center that also had a little museum, and we managed to spend a whole hour there. The friendly lady at the info booth let us in on a local tip and sent us off to an indoor playground/café where we found jumping castles and a great climbing structure. We spent several hours there running the kids tired.
In the afternoon it finally stopped raining and we were able to step outside for a while. We visited Umpherston Sinkhole, a collapsed cave turned English Garden, right in the middle of town. Then back to the RV and campground, praying for a sunny day tomorrow.
We woke up yesterday to a chilly but partly sunny day and set off to take advantage of it immediately. We drove 15 minutes south of Mount Gambier to Moutn Schank, another extinct volcano that has a relatively short walking path to its crater. Ron was excited at the prospect of seeing a volcano and the girls were feeling in good shape too. Both Shir and Orr climbed up all the stairs to reach the rim for a great view of the crater inside. This crater is above the water table so all it had inside was a grassy patch. Great views from the rim all around the area, which is mostly agricultural and pasture.
We returned to Mount Gambier to take in some of the blue lake vistas. Turns out that the lake is grey during the winter and then in the course of a few days in spring turns into a most vibrant blue. It reminded us of Crater Lake in Oregon, but on a much smaller scale here.
We drove another 50km north to reach Penola, a tiny town to the south of Coonawarra, a famed wine region here in Australia, and of special significance to Paola and myself. One of our favorite wines, Jamieson’s Run Cab-Merlot-Shiraz blend is concocted in this area. It was 4pm when we checked into a very basic campground and set off to the valley for some last minute wine tasting before closing time.
We found Wynn’s, one of the larger wineries and tasted some not so great reds. We learned that Coonawarra is famous for Cabernet-Sauvignon, whereas Barossa Valley is a Shiraz capital. We then had a good tasting at Poplar Wineries, where the folks where smart enough to set up a play corner for the kids right next to the tasting bar. This afforded us a full 15 minutes of relative quiet from the kids in which we indulged. We ended up buying a bottle of white dessert wine called Delicioso.
Dinner was OK, not great as we would expect in a region like this. We ate at a recommended place called Bushman’s, and the pizzas and pasta were fine, but oh the flair of a good Napa restaurant…
Today we started off with another wine tasting, this time at a cellar door representing Jamieson’s Run. Actually I tastes while Paola occupied the kids. We bought three bottles and headed north to Naracoorte Caves, a world heritage site where fossils of giant extinct Australian mammals were discovered. We visited a cave and then a small museum where they recreated the so called ancient creatures. Giant wombats, kangaroos and koalas. Interesting.
We decided that we want to visit Flinders Ranges, a national park about 700km north of the caves, so the rest of the afternoon was spent on the road, covering about 300km. We stopped for a one hour playground break at a town called Murray Bridge, which was the first place where a bridge was built of the… Murray River, how surprising.
The drive ended in Nuriootpa, a small town at the northern end of the Barossa Valley. We had a good B-B-Q dinner accompanied with a bottle of 2003 Mildara Cabarnet which we had gotten in the morning in Coonawarra. What a long day.
Good night,
-Hemi
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