We're Back!

Hello again, we are back both internet -wise, and from our holiday. The last two weeks were the second of the school holidays, between second and third terms. School resumes tomorrow, Tuesday, although teachers were back today for a pupil-free day. Keep checking back in the next week, as I will be chronicling our trip to the Red Centre of Australia.

To start with, we rented a campervan in Sydney on 6 July and started the long drive across the country to Adelaide. The first leg of the trip took us through the Blue Mountains to a town called Orange (the girls really wanted to go to a place called Orange). We had a good look at some of the spectacular scenery of this mountain range, including a stop at the lookout for the Three Sisters.














We saw a bit of the Outback as we drove through western New South Wales, including a herd of cattle on the road that we had to drive very slowly through.

We drove through the town of Hay and on to our second camp site, at Balranald. There is a fruit fly exclusion zone around this part of Australia, so we had to be careful to buy only what we could eat and not bring any fruit across the borders of this zone. There were lots of fruit fly signs at the side of the road, warning about transporting fruit across borders, including ones about the war against fruit flies. I guess it would be funny if they really weren't serious about this problem!


Entering South Australia, we were in a small wine growing region around Renmark, which was a really beautiful place along the Murray River, but the most beautiful part of the trip so far was the Barossa Valley, north west of Adelaide. We took some time to explore and went to a few wineries for some tasting and purchasing. This area was so much better than the Hunter Valley, it was bigger - there were vineyards as far as the eye could see in places, and more beautiful. We stayed there one night and then went on to Adelaide.




























Adelaide is the capital of South Australia, and is a city of about a million people. We visited Ayer's House, the residence of Henry Ayer, seven-time governor of South Australia and the namesake of Ayer's Rock, now known as Uluru.