I’m beginning to get the impression that SA is mostly a big wheat farm! That might be a slight exaggeration though…..and an indication we haven’t seen enough of it yet!

We arrived at the Yorke Peninsuala Wed arvo (12/11/14) for a quick trip – leaving Fri for Adelaide. We began by heading across the top to Wallaroo, and down the west coast. There was something weird about the town of Wallaroo, and it didn’t take long to work out what it was. A high percentage of houses have these tall towers beside them, about 2 – 3 houses in height, with TV aerials at the top! I didn’t take any photos, but the gave the suburb a very industrial look!

We stopped Wed night in the town of Maitland, and didn’t leave till late Thurs morning. Not because it is an exciting place, nor did we have vehicle troubles, but we figured it would be a good location to sort out my drivers license stuff. No, I’m not loosing it or anything like that…. it is up for renewal at the end of November. Unfortunately my current one is from an older era, so they can’t just send a replacement. Instead I had to go through this rigmarole of printing and filling in forms, declarations as to why I wasn’t in QLD, get proper photos done, and then get it all witnessed and signed by a JP and send it all off with a money order to QLD! I originally planned on doing this in Adelaide, but walking down the main street of Maitland Thurs morning, we realised I could probably do it all here a lot easier – the township, and everything I needed, is within a 200m stretch of road! Ended up having to shop around a little for a JP, but found one without too much difficulty (council office). So that’s that task all done and dusted! Nicole wasn’t keen on doing all the driving back to QLD!!

A quick stop and look at Port Victoria on the way down the west coast.

Innes National Park was our goal, though we only spent one night there – at Pondalowie Campground. Another nice national park, not dissimilar to Port Lincoln NP, which is only one peninsula across (to the west). We did a number of walks and had a good look around.

Pondalowie Bay is quite nice and sheltered. There is a little fishing village there, with a number of commercial boats anchored in the bay.

Very nice views in many directions from West Cape Lighthouse.

Lots of shipwrecks around this area. This one is at Ethel beach.

Views from Cape Spencer lighthouse.

A lot of gypsum mining used to occur around here, and still does in a limited fashion. This jetty, at the Stenhouse Bay area was in the loading of ships, and for delivery of incoming supplies.

This is one of two NP’s in SA where they are trialling online booking of campsites (as the only way to book). The online booking kiosk at the park entry was having problems, and the ranger who was leaving when we arrived was clear she was completely unimpressed with the system, but we had mobile coverage at the entry so could do it online easily enough ourselves. It’d be a great system for people who regularly go to a particular campsite each year, but is horrible for travellers who have no idea what the place is like and how long they want to stay – till they get there to see and experience it. And that’s how we travel… We ended up booking two sites at different campgrounds for the one night – one was booked when at the entry station, but the road turned out to be horrible. When we found another campground we liked that was closer (and had internet) we stopped there and booked that too! Fortunately we have that NP Pass, so no fees involved in either booking. Wonder what would happen if we just booked all the campsites for one night – get the place completely to ourselves!! 🙂

Leaving the NP we travelled across the bottom of Yorke peninsula, and then north up the east coast. More and more wheat… though having seen a little display at the Minlaton info centre, I realised that barley looks very similar to wheat. I’ve no idea which we’ve been looking at most of the time! Anyone know what the below stuff is? It looks like a field of dead weeds, but farmers don’t usually go planting and harvesting weeds!

We passed several huge grain ports/storage locations on the Yorke peninsula – at Wallaroo, Port Giles and Androssan. It would seem from the number of trucks we saw at the first two locations – lined up waiting to offload – that it must have been a good harvest this year. I might be wrong on that though – the truck lines might be extra long in good years! Androssan didn’t seem busy though.

We spent Thurs night at Androssan, before heading to Adelaide on Fri. We didn’t take the direct route, but cut across backroads through to the Barrossa Valley and the Adelaide Hills.

So the Yorke Peninsula – another nice little NP at the base of it, some nice little towns dotted around the edges, and the rest is farmland!