Wanderung 26

Bob:

We had enjoyed our stay in Portland and really I could have spent another couple days exploring the Maritime Museum and Automobile Museum and riding the trolley back and forth, but we felt it was time to move on into South Australia and work our way up to Adelaide. Monika had cleverly used the internet to reserve a motel in Kingston, roughly halfway between Portland and Adelaide, and then a motel on the outskirts of Adelaide for a few days.

We first took a tertiary road, C132, over to Mt. Gambier. The tertiary roads in Australia are typically paved 2-lane highways, but the pavement can be rough and they do not have paved shoulders. Still, for the maximum speeds of 100 kph (= 62 mph) allowed on Victoria's highways, the tertiary roads were just fine and this one had almost zero traffic as well as zero towns, stop signs, traffic lights, houses, or any other traces of human habitation. For the most part we knew people were living somewhere in the area as we saw pastures with either cows or sheep, and someone had to tend those animals. But in other areas such as the extensive tree farms, we saw no direct evidence of people living and working there. The rolling, wooded landscape reminded us of some areas in Missouri, but without the people!

Monika:

Bob:

In Mt. Gambier we stopped to walk 3.7 kilometers around Blue Lake, a lake set in a volcanic crater right on the southern edge of the town. The lake and the crater turned out to be almost the spitting image of Crater Lake in Oregon in the USA, right down to the unearthly deep blue color of the crystal-clear, pure water, but it was miniaturized. The city pumps out the water to use as its main water supply, but the water in the crater is refreshed from the limestone aquifer running underneath the whole area so it does not dry up. I ascribed the deep blue color to having water with no sediment or impurities and deep enough (70 meters) to filter out everything but the blue wavelengths, but then I read that during some months of the year the lake turns gray instead of blue, so now I am totally puzzled. What causes that color change?

Monika:

Bob:

Refreshed after our short walk, we continued on looking for lunch. Surprisingly we did not find any food offerings on our way out of Mt. Gambier, so we had to wait to the next town, Millicent. There we passed by a place called Jaffrey's, I think, that looked like it might have once been a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet but had then gone independent. Be that as it may, they offered many customized sandwiches in addition to the fried chicken options, and we settled on the "Blade Runner" that was filled with roast beef and sautéed onions. And when I say "filled", I mean that sandwich had about 5 layers of 1/4-inch slices of roast beef on it, which is just more than I've every had on a roast beef sandwich anywhere. But they also offered homemade potato salad, which we purchased for our lunch but couldn't finish, and homemade fruitcake, which I was wise enough to forgo.

Did I mention our lunch came with $1 cappuccino coffees? Well, the caffeine from that got me going again good and proper, let me tell you! We went rolling on down the B101, a secondary highway with shoulders and side stripes and everything, over to the town of Robes on the eastern shore of the Great Australian Bight, a very early port settlement. We stopped there to walk along the beach for a while, but the local folks said that the water was always far too cold to swim in. Sure enough, only the children went into the water and even they did not stay in very long, so we gave up the idea of a quick swim and continued on to Kingston, where we located our Econolodge and settled in for the night. I could have kept driving, I suppose, but maybe seeing the warning signs that "Drowsy Drivers Die!" repeatedly during the day was finally having some effect!

Monika: