Blogs from Peterborough, South Australia, Australia, Oceania

So, the next three days are a serious road trip. A total of more than 1200 kilometres over three legs from Melbourne in Victoria to Kangaroo Island in South Australia, via one night stops in Port Fairy and Robe. You can talk about your Route 66's and Pacific Coast Highway's, but the first leg of this route travels the world renowned Great Ocean Road and we were looking forward to yet more amazing views. But first, we had to get out of Melbourne and that had its complications. Poor old Sue's knee was proving really painful, so we left her to get up slowly and carefully, while Tim, Mandy & I left the hotel around 8.00am for the 10 minute walk to the Avis office, to pick up our hire car. For some reason, Trailfinders had ... read more

Peterborough and Terowie Just as the Murray River had a huge impact on central and North Victoria and South Australia with the paddle steamers making a life line, rail was the life of Peterborough and Terowie. These giants of rail transport firstly worked together, then Peterborough killed off Terowie as the Rail Hub of Central South Australia, but later, even Peterborough secumbed to progress and is a shadow of the former importance as a rail centre. In a well planned country, one would imagine that there would be one rail gauge used everywhere. Not here. South Australia had trains arriving/passing through with three different track gauges. Before getting to Terowie, we diverted a couple of Ks through the little rural town of Burra. This is a beautiful rural town with just a small population. If you ... read more

We did have slightly sore heads in the morning but it was our own fault for not eating dinner. We didn’t want the previous night dinner to go to waste so we ate smoked salmon and avocado sandwiches for breakfast (don’t think we are extravagant it was all reduced price) a slightly strange breakfast but tasty non the less. After driving back to waikerie for cold drinks we got on our way. Our first stop of the day was in Burra. It was a centre for copper mining in the mid 1800s with many people from all over Britain moving there. The largest community was the Cornish. Evidence of this can still be seen in the local café where the speciality is their Cornish Pasty! We would have loved to have tried one but as with ... read more