Day 72 Adelaide

Our industrious neighbours at Port Augusta decided to start their day at 4am this morning. They showed outstanding efficiency to get their van packed up and hitched up, and by 4:20 they were almost ready to begin moving. They’re final task was to ensure they had the radio tuned to the correct station and this only took 5 minutes with the aid of the search button and half a dozen in-car speakers.
Meanwhile, I was now awake and as the sun began creeping up into the still dark sky, I worked on converting my day 70 photos from RAW format to Jpeg while Jacqui and the boys slept. I’d changed the format on the digital camera to get better quality in the shots not realising that without a specific program installed on the computer, I wouldn’t be able to review or edit the RAW format shots. It’s not particularly exciting reading for you, but it was devastating for me to think that we wouldn’t be able to use or share the pictures of the Sea Lions. Day 70 would have been a blank page in our journey.
By 6am, I’d downloaded a program from the net and thankfully converted the pictures so it was now time to get the family out of bed. I was keen to be on the road fairly early to avoid as much of the 40+ heat as possible and an 8am start should have us in Adelaide by midday. We just needed to work out where we could stay once there. The camp book we have with us specialises in free camps, either just off highways and main roads, or along beachfronts and in national parks. We have nothing with us to help select or find organised caravan parks.
The drive down the eastern side of Spencer Gulf and then Gulf St Vincent was fairly uneventful, but for the hot northerly winds. They were fairly constant although every now and then, a much stronger gust would hit us side on. I could see it coming most of the time but a couple caught us off guard and one in particular was so intense, it pushed the car next to me on the two lane dual carriageway completely off the road. Thankfully, he didn’t hit anything but I’m sure he got an awful fright as he moved from tar to dirt without any conscious effort.
We arrived on the outskirts of Adelaide at about midday and with no real plan, we found ourselves driving along King William Road. For anyone that doesn’t know Adelaide, King William Road is to Adelaide what George Street or Broadway is to Sydney. Not somewhere you’d normally see a Jeep towing a caravan. We kept going west thinking there must surely be a caravan park somewhere near Glenelg. No such luck and we eventually found ourselves at a McDonalds on the southern end of town, trying to google Adelaide caravan parks, and then calling them in search of a vacancy. We got lucky with the second park we called and now we just needed to find it, without the GPS. It was locked away in a far corner of the van. We solved this, again with the help of Google, and we found ourselves driving through the streets of Adelaide with the laptop sitting on Jacqui’s lap. Makes sense but things became a little tense as Jacqui found it harder to rotate the laptop the way she flips a map around and strangely, left hand turns became rights and at times, the ocean was to our north. Never-the-less we eventually got to the correct spot and settled in.
Tomorrow should be just as exciting as we look for someone to replace the Jeeps shocky’s in preparation for Kangaroo Island and the great Ocean Road.
Cheers,
Jorg