1 Aug 2014

Well the morning started much the same as last night and it has been raining a lot, today is back to home, but the weather has not improved at all. Given that the weather didn't improve all the way back I only really stopped once at Ararat where I had a chat with the Visitor Centre people before running back to the car and just driving back to Melbourne. It was even snowing some of the way from Ballarat, so the poor little heater was trying to keep the windscreen clear and was failing most of the time.
Sorry no pictures at all today, really wasn't worth getting out of the car and prolonging the time I had to be in the car driving through the cold with the windows open to try and keep the misting of the windscreens to a minimum. It wasn't the most exciting part of the trip by a long shot.

So anyway that is it really untill I manage to get all of the fuel receipts sorted out and work out the final fuel costs and actual milage done, as the speedo is somewhat unreliable and the odometre tells me only 13133 kilometres were driven, which I am fairly sure is somewhat incorrect (8161 Miles it is telling me), hopefully that won't take too long.

Hopefully this has been of some interest to some folk out there, I certainly hope so, but I guess it is all done now as a whole of an around Australia trip, though I should be able to keep updating it occasionally whenever we go out in the Count to other places for day trips or weekends away, maybe it will be interesting as well.

Thanks for reading and being part of the around Australia trip though!

Gav

31 July 2014

Right now, this morning was all about going to the National Motor Museum in Birdwood, so not a long drive from Adelaide, but wow those South Australian drivers have some interesting ways about them. It took a bit longer to get out into the hills than I imagined it would, though to be honest it didn't really matter as I was there an hour before the Museum opened anyway, so plenty of time to have a look around the little town, which is a very nice little tourist town, as you'd expect in the Adelaide Hills. The museum was as it usually is and is a really good clean and tidy venue and the cars all look good and looked after, rather than ruff and dusty like some "museums" I have been to, such a wide variety of cars and motorbikes there too, which is great!

And they even let me put the Count on the forecourt for a pic before I left.

The it was time to head home so followed a few country roads 60km from Birdwood through to Murray Bridge, which is a some what large town, though still a country centre. I didn't get much time to take pictures there as it was here that the rain started again and it stayed with us all the way, it was not the most exciting of drives and made for a long day. I finally gave up 355km later at Horsham, as it was dark and still raining and I would have had another 4-5 hours of it before getting back to Melbourne and home.

  Here comes the rain again.

Tomorrow it is back home to Melbourne...

30 July 2014

Ok so this morning I checked out Port Augusta as I really hadn't seen anything of it after arriving late last night and finding a place to stay. It looks like a nice relaxed place and they have been doing a lot of work on tidying it up and seemingly trying to reinvent the town. It seems to have a few empty shops and closed businesses about the main street though. The esplanade area turns what would have been a grotty unused area into a great relaxed public space, it is just a shame that you have to find your way through or around a modern ugly shopping centre first before you can even see it, if it was an open view from the main strip to the esplanade it would work a heck of a lot better and really transform the town to a very relaxed bright place.

 Just beyond the Woolies at the end of the street there is the esplanade.

 I like the touch of razor wire on the fence, says a lot really 

 Looking across to the water tower.

 Old water tower is now a lookout.

 Town from the water tower.

  Town from the water tower.

Matthew Flinders Red Cliff lookout.

From here it was on to another 310km heading for Adelaide, though I did stop at Snowtown along the way, probably more from morbid curiosity that anything else, just to see the town and how it has developed in the wake of past horrors. It is an interesting little town and looks like a nice old place, though you don't see many people out and about there and the streets are mainly deserted other than for tourists and passing traffic looking for fuel or lunch, it seems a cold and desolate place despite for nice looking buildings. It is an unfair notoriety I guess that has tarnished what would otherwise be just an average country town as none of the murders actually took place there, it is just that the bodies were stored in a local disused bank vault for a while and that is where they were discovered. The town is trying to move on, but it is a bit macabre that you can still get plastic fridge magnets of the "Bodies in the Barrels" and post cards from the local takeaway, not too sure that it really helps the moving on thing. They are now trying to highlight and focus on the "Wind farming" industry nearby the town as a tourist focus. Oh and as a side note, the bank was sold eventually (it has an attached 4 bedroom house) and it is now someones family home, different.

 A monument to the wind farming they are focusing on now.

 This is actually the butchers shop.

 That's "the bank" closest to the camera, the police station is past the pub just three doors down!

Onwards and into Adelaide, which is much larger than I actually expect it to be, I don't know why I always think of it as a small place, but really it isn't that small at all. I am staying at a place in Glenelg so that easiest way to get there was through Port Adelaide, which is a place I have only been through very briefly once before, it really looks like and interesting part of Adelaide and I think I will have to check it out further in the future. Glenelg was it's usual self and there has been some redevelopment of some areas it is basically the same as it has been for years and years. Yes of course lots of apartments have gone in and it is much more high density and Magic Mountain (for those who are old enough to remember) has been replaced with a much less conspicuous building housing much of the same stuff, but basically the place is the same as I remember it, though this time there seemed to be very few people about and apart from chain type food places and Mexican and Tapas bars there didn't really seem to be much in the way of restaurants for dinner.

I caught the tram into the city and the old rattlers have been replaced with new quiet modern ones and the biggest thing I noticed was that it now goes all the way through town to the entertainment centre rather than just ending at South Terrace like it used to, so much easier to get into town, but that also means that it is much more used as a commuter system for the suburbs along its route, thus the trams can get really packed which can be a bother when they only run every twenty minutes. Anyway it was getting dark by this stage but at least the weather had cleared up a bit, so I had a walk about the city centre and there is a lot of reinventing happening here as well. There seems to have been lots of work done cleaning up and redeveloping the public space around Victoria Square and the entire of Rundal Mall is being redeveloped as well into a much "airier" usable space which looks good really. The foodie east end has certainly got lots of eateries and as usual some places are packed and some places have not a single person in them, funny how that happens, there are even close alignments with Melbourne institutions along that section though they have almost insignificant differences to show their unique identities which is quite funny. Over all an interesting city to visit and I know that my visit was very short, but planing to visit there again soon anyway.

Tomorrow it is time to head for home...