This is the day we have not been looking forward to. We have 6.5hrs of driving to our hotel. We then need to check in and dump countless cases and bags. Then, we need to get the car to the airport and deal with the many issues on that front.
We left at 9am and it was raining in Port Fairy, which still seems closed - it must be a holiday season place and only essential shops are open for locals out of season. We topped up the car with petrol and bought some sausage rolls - big mistake. When is a sausage roll not a sausage roll? When purchased in Australia and you are not used to these varieties. It is the same as their Cadbury’s chocolate - it has a familiar taste to it but there is something very wrong somewhere.
A couple of hours up the road we made our first stop. Mount Gambier. To be fair we stopped outside Macdonalds for breakfast first after the sausage roll issue. Guess what, the place was staffed by adults - coz the kids are at school. Anyway, Mount Gambier itself is a beautiful scenic area with many views and lookouts. They also have a number of different lakes and these differ in colour. It was still mild 17c but had stopped raining so perfect for us.
Then came hours of boring driving on boring roads as the temperatures climbed up to 28c and the landscape often looked barren in places. We stopped off in a place called Coonaplyn for a late lunch as it had this wonderful mural on a Silo.
The silo mural was very tall and consisted of 5 silos joined together that had been painted with children from the local primary school. This was to represent the future.
The second mural we saw was made of mosaic and was showing animals, birds and plants. Representing the nature around us. The final piece of artwork was found in a tunnel that connects one side of the train tracks to the other. The tunnel was painted yellow and then a series of painted wooden panels were attached to the wall of different sizes. Each one representing a school or organisation (i.e. Scouts) found in the area. It was very colourful.
We arrived at the hotel around 5pm - again not the easiest to find and the SatNav was very confused for while. We checked in, dropped everything off quickly, then headed off to the airport to drop off the car.
The car drop off experience was strange. We knew we had driven around 700km over our allowance so had to pay about 170 dollars as a penalty plus we had the bumper scrape to deal with but the people at the desk didn’t seem to care. They said they were a franchise and just collecting keys and someone would assess everything in time and get back to us. We took photos of everything and filled out an accident form to help speed things up but it seems it is a wait and see situation - Mark is convinced they don’t even know we have this car due to the problems we had previously as none of tolls worked automatically as they should and Mark had to email the toll company direct to rectify this. We are sure that we will be well home and still trying to sort this all out.
The end result was that we were soon back at our hotel and ready to explore Adelaide a bit and grab some dinner. First up, Adelaide is a big university city with many different campuses everywhere it seems. It is also a party city and reminded us a little of northern English cities like Newcastle or Leeds.
We ate dinner in a side street which was full of cafes. The waiter, a young lad from Liverpool travelling and working on a gap year, recommended a couple of small sharing plates and large one so we chose some breads, some fish and a large chicken dish. All very nice and eaten in the open air at 26c at 9pm. Felt very Mediterranean to us. The lad also informed us that this was the last weekend of the Adelaide fringe. Definitely something for us to consider but not tomorrow as we have a long tour ahead of us.
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