Yorke Peninsula

23/3/2018.  Friday.  The night was not as hot as it might have been but it was noisy.  Trucks flew by in both directions all night but R & R slept well and were in no hurry to get going as the intention was to be in Port Pirie about 9:00am.  They read a while and did emails before packing down. It was a lovely sunny morning, casting shadows, as RL drove south with the Flinders to the east and the rail and sea to the west, presenting lovely views in either direction.  They saw a very long train heading north. As with many of these coastal towns, you need to leave the main road and drive a couple of kilometres over coastal flats into them.  They arrived in Port Pirie as intended shortly after 9:00am and wandered downtown through all the op shops before a cuppa under the shady pines over the road from the Military Museum.  Thanks to a tip off from their friend, B, they enjoyed this fabulous display.  It is new and free and houses a helicopter which anyone is welcome to sit in.  The guy who showed us around, looked up G B, RL’s grandfather, for him.  At 12:30pm they headed for Woodward Park and enjoyed lunch under the pines.  Port Pirie has lots of grain silos and a lead smelter. As R & R drove southwards, they saw wind turbines, several sets of about 30 on several hills to the east.  These are the same ones that can be seen as you drive south on the other side of the range.  They stopped at Port Brighton about 2:00pm and spent just under an hour walking the jetty and dipping their feet in the Spencer Gulf.  All the way down the peninsula there is wheat and sheep farming and the Spencer Hwy veers towards the coast and back again. Just over an hour later, R & R stopped in Walleroo, another coastal town.  Reminding them a bit of Albany, it has woolly and butterfly bush in neat gardens and appears quite large and affluent. It has a jetty, a safe swimming area and a copper smelter.  There is quite a rich Welsh and Cornish cultural connection in this area as can be seen here at Wallaroo and 16kms south at Moonta.  Moonta was very busy downtown on a Friday just before closing time.  R & R were impressed with the many old buildings that were houses and still maintained for living in.  As in many other towns in the area, there were many fine old churches.  It is said that Adelaide is the city of churches.  Perhaps SA is the state of churches; so many, big, grand, old churches everywhere.   RL then headed inland to Maitland where there are large farms with new silos and sheds are being built.  Conditions must be good in this area with grain growing on vast undulating areas and big trees in shelter belts and lining the roads. They did see some areas where mistletoe creeper has disseminated patches of bush and tree. Here RL saw his first live snake on the road.  It was sandy in colour and neither a dugite or tiger snake.  They arrived in Maitland, which is big inland centre to service the sheep and wheat industry of the area, and parked the camper in a fee rest area over the road from the hospital but it was still so hot at 5:30pm that they walked downtown.  They set up and had dinner a little late, noticing a few flying ants but this time they were armed with spray.  RL turned off the lights and used wifi off the dongle which was in the laptop that RA was working on to set up the blog.  RA wondered about being over the road from the hospital … they did end up hearing a fire engine and then later an ambulance.

24/3/2018. Saturday. R & R slept well and, with the intention of being downtown Maitland when the shops opened, they read and worked on the computer before breakfast and packing the camper down.  They walked to take some photos of street names (including R, A, E and S) and went to Vinnies to check on Mass times for Sunday. Shortly before 10:00am, R & R left for Port Victoria which is only 21kms away.  Looking at a map of the Yorke Peninsula, it is much like Italy, in that its general shape is that of a leg or boot.  Generally speaking, there are three larger inland towns, Maitland, Minlaton and Warooka, which are service centres for the surrounding wheat, barley and sheep farming industry.  R & R spent the day weaving back and forth from these centres, ducking in and out of the coastal towns, with the main and minor roads running so close as to provide spectacular views of the pristine waters of the Gulf. Again, generally speaking the farming endeavours go almost to the coast where wheat stubble from this last summer can be seen growing within metres of the sea. Back to the analogy of the boot/foot: Port Victoria can be seen as just below the knee, Warooka in the instep, Corny Point (named by Mathew Flinders because it looks like a corn on a toe), Marion Bay as the ball of the foot and Edithburgh as the heel.  The towns of Stansbury, Port Vincent and Ardrossan, with all the smaller fishing/holiday villages in between, form the calf of the leg. At 10:40am ,R & R walked the Port Victoria jetty from which the big island Wardang, a shipwreck divers haven, can be seen. On the way to Minlaton, which is known as the barley growing capital of world and has a chocolate shop, there are some lakes.  It was a warm 33* day with a strong wind blowing incessantly from the west as the Hum drove to Warooka where the road runs along sand dunes for a while.  Warooka is a lovey town with more lovely old buildings. Corny Point is only 30kms from Warooka and the settlement of Corny Point is followed by a scenic, and winding, drive of 10kms out to the lighthouse and then a further 15 or so kilometres along the coast. Do not miss it. RL drove back into Corny Point at 1:35pm so that they could park under the pines and have lunch.  After that he drove to Marion Bay which is a pleasant drive along yellow sand dunes in coastal mallee country.  At the Marion Bay jetty one guy lost his rig to a sting ray and another caught a squid, these being the first fishing activity R & R had seen at all the jetties they have walked so far.  From there, R & R headed back inland to Warooka and then back out to Edithburgh (the heel) which is a big port with a wind farm and water towers. Here they saw scuba divers under the jetty searching for the leafy sea dragon which is the marine emblem of SA and a lighthouse on an island far out to sea.  They meandered their way up the back of the boot where there are lots of lovely, often two storey beach houses (formerly shacks), some of them for sale, and lots of private fishing boats of varying sizes.  Interestingly, there are lots of smaller older tractors, not for farming, but for use to get boats over the dunes and down to the water. Port Giles, only 10kms north, is a hub for grain export with massive Viterra silos.  North again, they stopped at Port Vincent which is a pleasant surprise as you drive down into it and back out again up a hill which has an old water tower before you join the Vincent Hwy again. RL drove another 40kms north to Ardrossan which is another large grain receival and export terminal.  It also has a large quarry on its southern entrance.  At 5:20pm they turned west, into the setting sun, for the last 20 minute drive back into Maitland.  The free rest area at which they had slept the night before was full so they headed for the another at the show grounds  It was a fine turn of event because they could have a proper shower and hair wash after a really warm day, rather than a bucket wash, for a $15/vehicle fee which the caretaker collects.  They set up and had dinner a little late before doing diary and ipad.  The canvas blew strongly in the wind … but they slept soundly despite a couple of hoons doing a 360* burn out on the track only 40m from their spot.

25/3/2018.  Sunday.  R & R woke to rain on the canvas but the wind was no longer so strong.  They read/wrote diary before breakfast and filled in time for the canvas to be dry to pack down. It didn’t matter as they had wanted to go to Palm Sunday Mass at St Bartholomew’s.  The people there were all so welcoming and after coffee, éclairs and biscuits, RL was driving east out of Maitland at 12:45pm to Ardrossan, another port town on the coast of the Gulf of St Vincent.  About half way, RL stopped to take a photo of a mould board plough which was erected in 1973 to the pioneer farmers in the Cunningham district.  Here they changed out of our church clothes and back into shorts not that it was very warm (only about 20*C and that incessant easterly wind) but just to be more comfortable. The drive over the rise and down into Adrossan was a surprise and RL saw the glint of high rise far away across the Gulf to Adelaide. R & R walked the jetty and saw a larger grey type of seagull they had not seen before.  What distinguishes this port from the others they had seen was that it has high red cliffs down to a base of red sand and rock at sea level.  It is also home to the inventor of the stump jump plough which made ploughing easier and more efficient. They ate lunch and by 2:15pm were on their way to Port Wakefield about 50kms away. There are gulf views to the west and farming lands to the east.  For part of the way, with a ridge to the east, the road runs just above sea level as close as is possible to the swampy flats.  There was also a section of road works with a speed of 60km/hr which didn’t bother the Hum at all, as it allowed for a safe speed to look around at the scenery. The last section of the journey at the eastern end of the Yorke Peninsula is much like that around Port Augusta only they were actually a few kilometres north of Port Wakefield and heading south off the Copper Coast Hwy.  All in all the Yorke Peninsula can’t be much more that 110kms from top to bottom, about 60kms across the foot and about 50kms at its widest part of the leg in a line from Wallaroo to Port Wakefield but RA’s overall impressions is that you could spend ages enjoying all that it has to offer. At 3:00pm R & R drove into Port Wakefield and were pleasantly surprised.  In that hot summer of 2013 they had stopped here and swum in this pool; such a relief on a scorcher of a day.  Today, being cool and windy was not the day for them to swim but now they would be able to remember that it was Port Wakefield where they had experienced such relief.  Since R & R were last here, a ramp over the coastal flats along the river to protect flora and fauna has been added.  They rang S, their son, while they had a cup of coffee, and after about an hour, headed south.  Shortly, the road divided with two lanes in both directions, with an army experimental and testing camp towards the coast and open farming land to the east.  RA actually saw a couple of horses at Wild Horse Plains as RL turned toward the coast 8kms into Port Parham.  Here, at the Foreshore, there is a large free camp with a limit of 14 days stay and a flushing toilet.  The camper was separated from the mud flat shoreline of the St Vincent Gulf by a single dune and it was windy!  So windy, in fact, that the top of the camper swayed; enough to cause RL to used its stabilizer bolts and tie it to the front and back of the Ute, while RA watched a couple of youths gallantly setting up a tent for the night. It look threateningly like there was a storm brewing … RA looked at the weather forecast and it indicated only a 30% chance of rain and it said nothing about strong winds.