Had an issue with the caravan. The fuse cover for the invertor started smoking, luckily Simon was in the van at the time so he quickly disconnected and got an auto electircian out to fix it. According to the auto electrician it happens all the time. Very worrying when sleeping on top of two lithium batteries!

Simon had more wine tasting this time at Penfolds and Elderton. I went to Maggie Beers farm and had got to go into her kitchen. Beautiful farm with gorgeous produce could have spent a fortune there.

Back in wine country. Simon had his own personal chauffeur around the vineyards for his wine tastings. Lovely lunch in Skillogalee. 

Stopped to see the steel works and the amazing circular jetty. The water was crystal clear.

Had to stop here to try the oysters and they were delicious. They even had emus in the middle of the town.

The opal capital of the world and a very different town. Nearly 60% of the locals live underground. You can see the air vents popping up out of the ground. Apparently this keeps their temperature between 23-25C at all times. There are underground churches, cafes and hotels here. We visited the Serbian underground church. The whole main street is dominated by opal shops and the town does not look that big but that’s because most is underground. As you travel along the main road both sides it looks as if there has been a giant mole going along its just piles of red earth everywhere. Did a trip out to Kanku – Breakaways Conservation Park to see the great views and the famous dog fence which runs 5300 kms to try and stop the dingos getting to the sheep. The Moon Plain is another area which is just rocks and is supposed to resemble the moon. This is where they filmed Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and Ground Zero.

Just an overnight stop over in a free camp. Simon happy as he could get down to the railway. Missed the train coming through as it was very early in the morning.

This is now a RAAF base which covers 122,000 square kilometres. However in 1947 there was a Anglo-Australian project which lasted 34 years and Woomera was one of the most secret allied establishments in operation during the Cold War. The British carried out 7 nuclear tests here on the Maralinga site, one of which was twice the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Needless to say, it is still contaminated to this day. Unfortunately a lot of indigenous people died and the Maralinga Tjarutja people only received $13 million in compensation for the loss of their land. When you visit Woomera museum there is hardly any mention of the nuclear testing it’s all about the rockets.

‘Little Cornwall’

This area is called the ‘copper triangle’ lots of Cornish and Welsh people came out here in the 1860’s. The Cornish worked in the mines whilst the Welsh worked in the smelting works as they were experienced smelters from Swansea. Wallaroo was predominantly a Welsh town and Moonta Cornish. Went to Moonta to try their Cornish pasties which were terrible, nothing like the real thing. Quite a few Cornish flags up in the town and lots of similar names.

Wallaroo had a lot of mist or fog one day. It stayed all day getting thicker as the day went on, very odd weather.

We left our caravan on a property in Jupiter Creek so that we could fly back to Brisbane for a week. I had put a call out on Facebook on the Lap of Australia group for somewhere to park and this lovely couple Stuart and Ruth replied and offered us a park. Imagine my surprise when we rock up and the house name is a Welsh one ‘Bron yr Aur’. Apparently Led Zeppelin used to write songs in a cottage called Bron yr Aur and has a song named after it. Stuart is a Led Zeppelin fan. It was meant to be the Welsh connection.

We happened to visit on a Sunday and it was heaving with people. It’s a very German town so the restaurants serve German food, the bakery does German bread and there is a Christmas shop where you can buy cuckoo clocks or Christmas decorations. A very different town. We have since learnt that all the locals avoid Hahndorf at the weekends because of all the visitors.