Limestone Coast

We find ourselves at our first stop in South Australia in the lovely seaside town of Southend. We opted for a small caravan park in town which just happens to have great facilities – a very well supplied kitchen and a huge hall which is used as a recreation room. Yesterday rained all day and we were very glad to be able to escape the weather and catch up on some school and work without having to put a lot of effort into dodging the bad weather.

The beaches and bay here are spectacular, and for once we’re out of the wind. We drove around to Beachport which is the other side of the bay, and the win was blowing pretty hard there, but it is an interesting little town with the second longest jetty in SA – which is closed for maintenance, so we had to just have a look at that from the shore (then we got back into the car, out of the wind and drove on to Robe).

Robe is a much bigger town and obviously a haven for some wealthier residents. There was a great array of shops there, but mostly out of our price range. We ventured into the lolly shop for about 30 seconds – there were $6.50 bags of lollies in there with about 50c worth of lollies in them. The kids’ usual $2 budget would have bought them nothing in that shop.

They town has some interesting colonial heritage and we walked (in the howling wind mostly) around to the (small) jetty and the obelisk (its not an ancient Egyptian obelisk carved from granite by unknown means, but a lump of concrete like an oversized traffic cone, used to warn sailors about their impending doom). The whole town has embraced it as an attraction or perhaps a logo of sorts to let everyone know what Robe is about – perhaps they have all had some of the obelisk coolaid…

There is also the remains of an old gaol which we explored on the way back to town where we had some local fish and chips for lunch.

We headed back to Southend where we took advantage of the facilities and cooked ourselves nachos in the oven. As usual we were all singing, “Nacho, Nacho Man, I wanna be, a Nacho Man.” for quite a long time before and after dinner. For some reason and despite having watched very little of The Simpsons, my kids seem to know a lot of the best parts of the show. School of Dad is always in.

We went back to Mt Gambier on Sunday for a better look around. The photos tell the best story, but they have a blue lake, which turns blue in November and then back to usual grey in late March, other lakes in old volcanos, not one but two sink holes in town (one much more interesting than the other). We climbed up Mt Gambier and from below the tower at the top we had a great view of the city and surrounds.

Worth noting that Mt Gambier is the second biggest city in SA – Adelaide at 1.4 million then Mt Gambier at 28,000. Mum related to me that quite a few years ago she camped with Dad in Mt Gambier in the old George Pickers tent (no floor, canvas sides which stop about 2 inches off the ground). It was apparently very, very cold (I can confirm that Mt Gambier is cold)) and they didn’t, in those days, have the means for a decent Rum Cloak, but had to try to develop a Plonk Cloak by getting stuck into a gallon of Mildara Plonk from the cellar door. Apparently it was not a good quality cloak, but clearly it was memorable (and very cold) since it still sticks in her mind many decades after the event.