Adelaide to Melbourne

---

This morning, we packed our bags for the last time on this holiday. Both down to our last pair of clean undies we need to get home to do a big wash! We had a quick breakfast with Meredith then (mainly) Bernie started the task of re-packing the truck for the final leg of the journey. The truck had been parked out on Carrington Street overnight, but Bernie managed to move it into the lane adjacent to the apartment this morning which meant we didn’t have quite so far to ferry the luggage to the truck.

Aiming to be on our way by 8.00am we managed to pull out onto Carrington Street at 8.30am. We negotiated our way out of the city in moderate peak hour traffic. At the last set of lights before the start of the freeway Bernie pulled up on the red but a racy red classic car cruised past us. Wait a minute it’s Mr Angry. This car has personalized number plates and we saw it several times on Monday when we, and they, were pulling in and out of the Bunda Cliffs lookouts! Their itinerary must also have included two nights in Adelaide, and they are continuing east at the same time as us. What are the chances? We doubt they noted the MU-X in the same way that we noticed their fancy wheels and personalized number plate, ha, ha.

We had a smooth run through the Adelaide Hills. A few patches of roadworks but little traffic and no delays. We cruised into Murray Bridge and across the Mighty Murray. Travelling eastbound there is a lookout that you can pull into which we imagine gives a lovely view down over the river BUT after crossing the bridge Bernie was accelerating back to 110/kph around a corner and by the time we noticed the lookout sign it was too late to make the turn off. Ah well.

We continued along the Murray River to Tailem Bend. Their corella population seems as out of control as when we passed through in 2018 on our way to Kangaroo Island. The T

Trees alongside the highway were covered in corellas squawking so loudly we could hear them in the car! On the other side of Tailem Bend we were looking for the OTR (BP) Motorsport Park. We saw a big sign and pulled into the slipway for … the Karoonda Highway. Whoops, not yet. Second attempt, practically right under the green and gold BP sign had us pulling into a driveway to a locked gate. What? Where is the BP if it’s not where its bloody big sign is? A few more kilometres east we found the service station. We are really confused about the sign in the middle of nowhere that looks like it belongs on the service station forecourt?

Last fill up beore Melbourne. Eighty litres of fuel will well and truly see us to the conclusion of this road trip. We used the loos and were really surprised to find so few in such a large, new service station. Surely, they could have spared the room for a few more facilities? Tracey jumped in the driver’s seat and piloted the truck along Dukes Highway to Coonalpyn.

Although we have seen and photographed Coonalpyn’s art silo before it was good to exit the car and have a walk and a stretch. One of the earliest silos to be painted this one was completed by Guido van Helten in 2017. He titled it ‘Hope for the Future’ and his subjects were local primary school children. We parked on the eastbound side of the highway on this stop and noticed some welded metal art on that side … of a fellow in an overall with a can of spray paint pointing towards the silo. Ha, ha, we guessed it is supposed to represent Guido while he was working on the silo?

After her driving stint between Tailem Bend and Bordertown Tracey is expecting a speeding infringement notice in the mail. Cruising into Keith she WAS braking as she passed the ‘Speed Limit 80’ sign, but there was a sneaky police car parked between the ‘80’ and ‘60’ signs which were located very close to each other. With it being the end of the month AND Easter, they were probably looking to bag a few speeding drivers to make their quota?? What has happened to the ’80 Ahead’ signs that preceded the speed limit signs on the western side of Adelaide? Those give you a better chance of actually slowing to eighty by the time you reach the ‘80’ sign. It will be interesting to see if a nasty (expensive) surprise turns up in the post?

It was time for lunch when we arrived in Bordertown, so we made our way to the Bordertown Bakery. Arriving at lunch time it was doing a roaring trade in sandwiches, rolls, pies and pasties. We took our rolls and Bernie’s sausage roll (and hot cross buns for the weekend) around to the Rest Area at Tolmer Camp.

The camp was named after Police Commissioner Alexander Tolmer who was instrumental in saving South Australia’s economy in the early 1850s. When gold was discovered in Victoria in 1851 there was an exodus of South Australians to the goldfields … and they took all their money with them. On top of this, all the gold that they found in Victoria remained in Victoria causing South Australia to become almost bankrupt.

Tolmer suggested the establishment of a police escort to travel along a direct route to Mount Alexander, collect the gold from SA miners and bring it back to Adelaide. A Half Way station for the gold escort was established at Bordertown where the troopers could rest and change horses. Between February 1852 and December 1853 eighteen successful gold escorts were conducted and gold to the value of over three million dollars was delivered safely to Adelaide.

While we were eating, Tracey had been commenting to Bernie about the ridiculous queue over at the Ladies toilets. Tcht, always a queue at the Ladies! After finishing our rolls, she headed over to join the queue. People were so frustrated with the queue that they were not hesitating to use the unisex disabled loo as well. When someone came out of the other door it turned out that it was a door into a space containing three able-bodied toilets BUT ‘there’s only paper in one’ the lady exiting declared. Seriously, it’s the Thursday before Easter weekend?!

Anyhow, Tracey dived in declaring that she didn’t care because she had a stash of toilet paper in her bag. Except … she didn’t because she changed bags while we were in Adelaide and the one she had on her today did not have a stash of toilet paper! Aha, she did have some tissues though so made do with one of those. There was a notice outside the loos with a phone number to call if there was a problem with the public toilets. Tracey did the civic minded thing and called the council to report the lack of toilet paper leading into the long weekend. The person who answered thanked her for reporting it and claimed that she would ‘send someone straight away’.

With Bernie back at the wheel we swung back to the Dukes Highway and turned right, continuing east towards home. After 20 kilometres we crossed the border back into Victoria. The name of the highway changed to the Western Highway and the speed limit was reduced to 100/kph. Actually, we think the speed limit was 100/kph from Bordertown because we had noted the speed limit signs were saying ‘100’. For a few Ks we thought that perhaps we had already crossed the border and missed it? But, no, soon we rocketed past the ‘Welcome to Victoria’ sign.

We made a decision at the bakery in Border Town that we would buy vanilla slices in Victoria, maybe at Stawell? Then after a while Tracey said - Hmmn Stawell on Easter Weekend??? It’s likely to be crazy! Bernie recalled looking at the route options that Apple Maps offered and said - We could probably go via Bridgewater/Bendigo rather than Ballarat as it only adds about four minutes to the journey.

Anyhow, with no particular decision made, we arrived at Pink Lake and pulled into the car park that overlooks the lake So. Many. People. And ALL the other cars in the car park was pointing west. Ha, ha, we were the only ones heading towards Melbourne for the Ester long weekend. We could see that there was no water in the lake pink or otherwise, but we walked down to the shore anyway to take some photos of the pinkish salt. Bernie even put the drone up for some more practice. Apparently, this pink lake near Dimboola is at its pinkest after a rain event. Perhaps we will do a day trip one day after it has rained to witness this phenomenon? It’s certainly closer than the pink lakes in SA and WA.

The SatNav was reprogrammed to take the slightly more northerly route and with Tracey at the wheel we set out for Bridgewater. Oh yay, Apple Maps directed us to turn left onto the Borung Highway and it was lovely but then Syri insisted that we should go overland via Minyip and Banyena and eventually into St Arnaud. With roadworks and single-track bitumen Tracey accused Bernie of having her drive on all the ‘best’ roads! He countered by saying that he had done all the dirt road driving. Tracey refuted this reminding him of her stint on the unsealed Emu Fence Road AND claimed that passing oncoming vehicles with the passenger side in the dirt and the driver’s side on the bitumen is worse than having both wheels on the same surface be it dirt or bitumen. Bernie was not convinced.

Relieved to have reached Stawell on the roads less travelled, Tracey pulled over on the Main Street and switched to the navigator’s seat … after we had both taken a couple of photos and flapped around enough to earn our ‘Stand’ hours. The one good thing about the preceding hour or so of driving was that there was very little traffic and certainly no trucks and caravans to be overtaken. It certainly wasn’t all bad taking the back roads.

We departed Stawell and turned left onto the Wimmera Highway heading towards Bendigo rather than having taken the Western Highway through Stawell to Ballarat BUT it soon became obvious to Tracey that we were not heading quite as far north as Bridgewater!! Damn. Tracey Googled for an alternate route to take us over to the Calder Highway at Inglewood and more single-track bitumen road driving ensued. With the afternoon drawing to a close, the big questions were – will the Bridgewater Bakery still be open and, if it is, will they still have vanilla slices?

Disaster! Although the Bridgewater Bakery was open at 4.45pm (just, scheduled to close at 5.00pm) they had sold out of vanilla slices. We shoulda bought them at Bordertown! Or maybe Tracey should have rung an order through so they could hold a couple of vanilla slices for us? We decided to sample some lemon and coconut brownies instead. The girl who served us called them brownies but being light coloured, perhaps they should have been called blondies? Definitely no chocolate in them.

Still two hours to home. It has been a very long day on the road, but it will be wonderful to be sleeping in our own bed tonight! The closer we drove to Melbourne, the more congested it was on the OTHER side of the road with the Easter Weekend exodus from the city. We were very happy to be swimming against the tide as it were.

Bernie finally reversed the truck into the driveway just before 7.00pm. Phew, with rest breaks, driver changeovers and our lunch stop we’d been on the go for 750 kilometres and ten and a half hours today. In all, we have been on the road for 34 days and we have driven 9,237 kilometres! An epic road trip for sure. Tomorrow will be soon enough to tackle the washing and make a start on getting all of the red dirt out of the truck and then … in the weeks following, finalize our preparations for our next trip.

The countdown to our flight to Dublin, Ireland is 38 days. Living the dream!



Steps: 4,961 (3.40kms)

---