Summer Journeys - Road to Adelaide

This leg of the trip was filled with highs and lows. Examples of a high is stopping in Mt Gambier an experiencing extreme blueness or visiting Kingston SE. An example of a low is the 145km of nothingness between Kingston and Meningie.

I get a little excited about state borders

We left Nelson fairly early on New Years Day. Michelle, ever the geologist, was very excited about witnessing the crater and blue lake. I will not lie, it actually was quite amazing and very, very blue.

Following some advice from a local Michelle and I stopped by the local motorbike races. We watched a couple of laps and left a little disappointed.
We continued up the Princes Highway stopping in Robe and Kingston SE (I think the SE stands for South East - if anyone knows please leave a comment). Robe has both an interesting name and an entry in Lonely Planet - but it seemed like a fairly boring place. We had lunch there - I think it was an amazing pizza.

Michelle locates us on the local map at Kingston SE

Kingston, on the other hand, was great. There was a stone menagerie, a giant lobster, random tiles, weather predicting rocks, and even a sun dial!After Kingston was a crapload of nothing. The road was straight and empty; we couldn't see the beach. Every now and then we would pull over to look at rock stacks (as directed by little roadsigns with cameras).

Only some people will get this joke (also in Kingston)

Suprisingly these were often better than the ones on the Great Ocean Road (ie the twelve apostles), just without the marketing of Victoria.

There was a little bit of excitement when we came across humourously named places such as Chinamen's Wells and Policemans Point (there were neither chinamen or policemen), but two chuckles didn't really liven up the hour and a half on the road.

The Kingston sundial

By the time we got to Meningie it was getting late in the evening, but Michelle and stopped to stretch our legs and do a bit of exercise at the local playground. Then we pushed on to the Mighty Murray.

The Murray, which will be a feature of a future blog post, had me ecstatically excited.

This was our first sighting - there will be many, many more

We stopped off in Tailem Bend, named after the sharp bend in the Murray. It has some history with trains I think, as there was a locomotive near the entrance to the town.After a brief rest we completed the final 100kms to Michelle's cousins house (Geoff - more on him later), where we ate a pasta feast, drank home brew and slept.

For those of you who ride motorbikes observe the angle of the 'bag rack' in the shadow.
I kept an eye on it all the way from Torquay and I am 110% surprised it didn't snap off.