Hats off to anyone who has done the Kings Canyon Rim Walk 👏

The scenery is worth it, especially if you take the detours, (and you definitely should), but it certainly isn’t a casual stroll! Like Uluru, the photos only capture a tiny bit of the beauty… and the morning sunrise from our campsite was pretty spectacular too 🌞

Uluru… sunset… magic 🌞😘

Driving to Uluru (Ayers Rock) from the south we had the experience I’m sure many have… the “is that it?” “it can’t be” “it looks like it” “we’re too far away” discussion- I’ll call it the Mount Conner conundrum!

It really is true when they say no photo can ever do Uluru justice. Everyone has seen pictures, we’ve included our own here, but nothing comes close to experiencing the amazement you feel as you catch the first glimpses on the horizon and then get close enough to see it fill your field of vision.

We got up early to beat the crowds and rode bikes around the rock as the sun rose. 🌞 That night we headed out after sunset to see the Field of Light. Another amazing experience that also cannot be accurately captured on our iPhone cameras.

The next day we headed out to Kata Tjuta (The Olgas) and did the Valley of the Winds walk. This was a grade 4 hike that had steep, rocky sections but it is such a unique place you accept the difficult terrain for the pay off you get back with the view.

Biking around Uluru and hiking around Kata Tjuta… our favourite things of this trip so far!

Coober Pedy gave us our first day of LOTS OF FLIES 🦟 and our first night of LOTS OF STARS! 🌟 We enjoyed rugging up, sitting outside and gazing upwards… although as you can see in the photo James and Emma’s interest did wane just a little 😴

We also had our first night of not sleeping in the Motorhome here as we couldn’t come to Coober Pedy and not spent a night underground!

As Winter officially starts it feels well timed that we are now heading north! As much as our first month has been great, most of where we’ve been and what we’ve seen since leaving Sydney, (besides Kangaroo Island), were places we have been and seen before. From here on though, it’s all new to us. Hitting the Stuart Highway almost felt like the first 4 weeks of our journey were a pleasant warm up of getting to know the Motorhome and working out our routines before the REAL adventures begin. Here’s to cool nights and cooler sights 😎

As the great George Costanza once said, “the sea was angry that day my friends.” 🌊When travelling you accept that bad weather will come with the trip and just hope that it is only an occasional visitor! Since we arrived a few days ago at West Beach, about 10km from the centre of Adelaide, the wind has been howling in from the Antarctic relentlessly, bringing sideways rain with it. Around 4am last night we had to scramble and collapse the tent for fear of the poles snapping.💨 Needless to say we have focused on indoor activities- we had a cinema all to ourselves at Glenelg to see Aladdin.

We jumped on a bus and headed in to the city centre of Adelaide for dinner. 6 years ago, Michelle and I had visited and eaten at an Argentine restaurant called Sosta and honestly it was my main reason to revisit Adelaide! We’re not normally post pics of food people but have included a photo of our meat platters… happy to say it lived up to my memory. 😜 With that budget blowing meal we’ll be back to noodles and cheese toasties for the next few days.

Flinders Chase National Park.

Home of Remarkable Rocks, Admirals Arch, a few lighthouses, some amazing hikes and, best of all, an abundance of native wildlife. We stayed just outside the park at Western KI Caravan Park and it is our favourite campsite so far! A short stroll from where we were staying brought us to our first koalas of the trip and dozens of the cutest wallabies ever. There were also plenty of Cape Barren Geese who seemed to enjoy hanging out with the kangaroos. The time we have spent on KI has easily doubled our animal count, (sadly the dead as well as the living count.) 😢

The two animals we are still hoping to see are platypus and echidna. On one of our hikes there were some platypus waterholes and we approached as quietly and waited as patiently as we could. You’ve never seen more excitement to see bubbles rising up out of the water since you were a kid and discovered farting in the bath! 😉 Unfortunately we didn’t see any platypus that day (we think the bubbles may have belonged to yabbies.) As for the echidna, where every small bush looks like it could be an echidna, we haven’t confirmed a definite visual of one of those either. 🧐

PS At Admirals Arch, we saw 3 times as many seals than we saw at Seal Bay!

Next stop- Adelaide.

With a few more hours to wait than we expected to get the ferry to KI, we decided to see a little more of the Fleurieu Peninsula and pop out to Victor Harbor. We had a lovely walk over the causeway to Granite Island where we enjoyed the scattered quirky artworks and were lucky enough to spot a seal showing off in the water below.

On the subject of seals, our first stop on KI was Seal Bay. It’s a protected area and home to the 3rd largest sea lion colony in Australia. We were up on the boardwalk but there were a few sea lions that seemed happy enough to come close and pose for pictures. There is also a skeleton of a juvenile humpback whale that had been beached as! In the last photo, James got innovative with his binoculars and the camera lens of his phone to get a ‘close up’ shot 🔭

With Michelle’s family’s Slovenian background Hahndorf was always a scheduled stop on our trip around Oz. Half an hour out of Adelaide, aussietowns.com says “Hahndorf is a little piece of Silesia, Prussia and Germany in the Adelaide Hills. Proudly declaring itself “Australia’s Oldest German Town” and offering lots of sausages, sauerkraut, steins of beer, window boxes with dense floral displays, and Lutheran churches, it is quintessentially Central Europe in the Adelaide Hills. This charming town is characterised by shady, tree-lined streets; lots of shop signs in Teutonic script; and busloads of German tourists being entertained in cafes, beer halls and restaurants run by the descendants of the town’s early German settlers. Today it is one of South Australia’s premier tourist attractions. There are few places in the country where you can drive through typically Australian countryside and, quite suddenly, enter a world which seems to have been lifted out of Europe.”

Definitely the best eating we’ve done on this trip so far!

PS First few photos are from a rest stop in Keith, SA. A quick ride and a pee break, what else do you need?

Having read people’s posts regarding the VIC into SA border crossing we diligently gathered up our excess fruit, (2 mandarins, 1 apple), and threw them away. We were ready and compliant for our Motorhome to be thoroughly inspected and then… nothing. The sign said “Welcome to South Australia” and we realised that the scenic drive we had decided to follow that morning from Port Campbell to Mount Gambier must have taken us on a non-inspection road and our 2 mandarins and 1 apple could have survived the journey!

Mount Gambier had 3 things we wanted to see- Cave Gardens, Umpherston Sinkhole and The Blue Lake. The sinkhole was cool, the lake isn’t at its best in May, and unfortunately Cave Gardens had more rubbish in it than garden, wasn’t even worth a photo. 😥