Cafe Terre

What an ‘Outhouse’.

When I walked back from the outhouse I came across this young Sprite guarding some dogs (J)

Must be a Lavender Sprite!

On our last day at our caravan park we saw what must be the ultimate touring rig. When is Xmas??? The Camper was towing a special trailer that had a toolbox for storage, space to park a Suzuki Vitara and hold a Tinnie and a motor. There was a special device to lower the Tinnie to the ground. Wow, enough to make your mouth water.

Dear Father Christmas, I have been a good boy all year……

We decided to explore the Adelaide beaches as we had never been there on previous visits to Adelaide. We picked Brighton and Glenelg as they are beautiful sea-side suburbs. Brighton is really neat and green and has lovely homes with great gardens. The cafes are trendy and we sat down for a hot ‘flat white’. The beaches are well maintained with good infrastructure.

Where is the coffee?

Brighton Pier

Roses

Brighton beach looking onto the next suburb

Glenelg was the next place we stopped off at. Lots of Apartment buildings on the beach and a small boat marina made this place look very Yuppy. We returned back south to McLaren Vale via some beach suburbs and stopped off at Maslin Beach. Here we took the dogs for a swim and had a great walk along the beach. We thought we saw one guy frolicking in the surf without his swimming trunks. On our return to the caravan park we found out that Maslin beach is a known nudist beach; hahaha.

Glenelg Beach front

As we had a few hours left to the afternoon we went off to do some wine tasting. A friend had recommended some good wineries that we now looked up. At both the wines were excellent. In fact I tasted some of the best Shiraz I have ever tasted. As a bonus the area is spectacularly scenic; see pics of gardens at Corlio wines and Samuel Gorge wines.

Corlio’s gardens

The gardens and flowers here at the McLarenVale wineries are some of the best I have ever seen.

We moved to the Port Vincent Foreshore Caravan park. We had heard from a number of sources about this great caravan park. It is situated right on the beach. The park has good facilities and is kept clean and neat all the time. The trip yesterday had established Port Vincent as top pick after Point Turton.  As I am writing this content I am very glad that we are here at Port Vincent. We have booked in for 6 days.

Port Vincent Bay from our Caravan

Port Vincent Marina

Port Vincent is just short of half way up Gulf St. Vincent. You can see the Adelaide Hills from here and the lights of Adelaide at night. It is around 230 km from Adelaide by road. It has a small town centre, a very modern marina and some great beaches. The caravan park is right on the beach with the ‘front row seats’ overlooking the gulf. If you are in need of a great coffee in a very friendly environment, the ‘Chill Out’ café in main street will do you just fine. They make good food as well with their bacon & egg roll serving as a good breakfast a number of times. Every day we go for a swim with the Spoodles and walk along the kilometers of beach.

Front row seats

21/10 Yesterday we decided to do a bit of a tour of the middle Yorke peninsula. We headed north from Port Vincent to Port Julia. This is a little village that has a jetty and was once used to ship grain. The main reason I even mention this place is that they have a most amazing road sign; ‘CHILDREN DON’T BOUNCE SLOW DOWN’. How weird! Did they test this?? If so how?? Did they drop a child from 6 foot and measure the bounce? Surely a ‘beware of children’ sign would have sufficed??

How did they get to know this?  Did they do some Testing?

We continued to Ardrossan that is part of the Copper mining area. Just south of the town there is a impressive  lookout place that has been established on top of a very large mining dump. The views are grand from here. Ardrossan is a nice sized town with good infrastructure, a good jetty for squidding and mining/shipping piers and infrastructure.

Ore shipping facility

Open Cast mining at Ardrossan

Ardrossan

We continued to Maitland that was the biggest centre on this trip. It is mainly agricultural. From there we went on to Port Victoria and back to Port Vincent. Port Victoria, on the west coast of the Yorke, has a great jetty and swimming beach. It looks out over the Point Pierce islands and peninsula which are Aboriginal  land. Back here at Vincent the local sailing club had a regatta going.  At the end of the day the dogs passed out, they had a huge day.

Pier at Port Victoria

Sailing Regatta at Port Vincent

The only good Spoodle is a sleeping Spoodle

Today we decided to extend our stay by another 6 days.