Wineries are great and all, but can be a little pretentious at times. All trying to outdo each other,screaming, look at me , look at me, look how grand and expansive I am, and therefore, my wines must be really, really good. But it’s not all about size,as the saying goes. It’s not how big it is, but what you do with it that counts. But I suppose traditionally there is a bit of snobbishness that goes with wine, and hence wine tasting, Looking in the carparks you get your Audi’s, BMW’s, and Mercedes….and when a dusty, travel stained, weary looking Little Bus that hasn’t had a shower for 6 weeks pulls in, you could almost hear them muttering  and cringing away, incase some of that dirt rubs off.

So that’s one reason why we do the breweries, Little Bus snuggling in beside the pumped up dual cabs and home grown campervans, next to the tin shed with the good music drifting out and sometimes even smoke from the log fire….. much more to our liking.

Sometimes we are the only people there, but once we shared it  with a bus load of aged care residents, their walkers forming a convoy snaking through the bar area (the spell checker turned that into bare arse but that gives an easily imaginable picture that you didn’t really need did you)…..but good on the aged care company for doing it.

Wineries do make for an enjoyable drive through the countryside, the vines stretching away up the hills, and we have been clocking up some km’s. And, we are quite familiar with the area north of Adelaide now, especially Gawler and Tarlee, for reasons that will become clear.

We did, however, get out eastward exploring Historic Burra mining town.

Off grid, we camped at Redbanks and World’s End, where we had the World’s best baked apples and clocked up some steps…. It still amazes me how vans herd together 15 of them in one place, and just around the corner, we get it all to ourselves….

Just outside the Barossa, we ended up having to replace the house battery in Little Bus, and discovered in the process  that the battery management system wasn’t quite as good as we thought, if we had something connected directly and NOT going through the controller (like an inverter) it didn’t take that into account, so, it thought the battery had more juice in it than it actually had,  hence told us we had enough juice to get through the night…. but we didn’t.  Consequently, when it was charging  up, it only topped up what it thought it had used, and not till the battery was full! Hence, we kept running out of charge.

Anyway we didn’t find this out until the new battery was in, and after tricking the charger, it’s now working great. And we have a full working battery!

Big smoke

Leaving the valleys and the wide open plains, we spent 2 days in the big smoke of Adelaide taking in museums and walks along the river, koala spotting (and not seeing any). Little Bus had the chance to put her wheels up and rest for a day while we wore down the tread on our shoes, We can highly recommend the South Australia Museum and the National Railway Museum…. neither off which had koalas either.

From Adelaide we drove down towards the coast but via the hills and Mt Lofty. Jo’s finger prints can still be seen in the steering wheel from the skinny hairpin bends and steep drops down from the misty mountains. The goal was to see the view from Mt Lofty, but as with last time, it was a white out…. from there, we dropped down to a little picnic ground for hot chocolate to steady our nerves and gather our thoughts. AND… we saw koalas, not one but two sleepily lazing around in the treetops. AND little blue wrens, And a babbling brook….. very nice stop.

Then we had cheese tasting, and a brewery ( the one with the aged care) complete with a rusty Cobb loaf full of cheesy flavour sauce and dark ales…. yummm..  in case you hadn’t realised we do like our cheese, bread and beer….

Eventually we reached the coast, booked in to our stay and crashed.