Our last night on the Yorke Peninsula - thank you Alford

Leaving Marion Bay was hard as we really enjoyed the company of our new friends and Hamish had become good friends with Charlie.  They were like two peas in a pod.  I think it was the fastest Hamish had ever eaten his breakfast and gotten dressed as he wanted to go and play with Charlie.  At least that made packing up easy for us but getting Hamish into the car wasn’t so easy.  Well in fairness he hoped in but he was so upset and devastated to be leaving his new mate.  Really broke our hearts.

We had wanted to try and get away at 9am so then we could get an hour down the road before we had to stop and do a LSODE New Families Online Session (Distance Education for Hamish).  As always we didn’t get away until closer to 9:45am which at first we thought would mean that we would have to pull over after only half an hour, however we soon remembered that we were ahead by half an hour so had a bit of time up our sleeve to at least get to the next town.  I had a bit of trouble logging in but eventually I got there and managed to work it all out.  I of course had the webcam on so they could see I was sitting in the car!  Still it was just an information session and I certainly don’t plan on doing Hamish’s school lessons in the car.

Jason pulled over in Warooka so I could do the session without the kids in the car.  This delayed us by one and a half hours but eventually we got going again.  Once back on the road we decided to head straight to Alford where there was a cheap camp area run by the town’s progress society.  Once we arrived it was obvious that we need to pick up our act a bit with the free camps as these seasoned nomads travel early to get the good spots.  We had wanted to pull up right near the playground but that would have been too close to the other nomads and we ended up pulling up besides the old school building so we would get the sun to charge the solar panels.

Not the smartest of decision really as we had to jack up the front of the caravan a fair bit as the ground wasn’t level.  We even put down the caravan legs to hold the weight of the caravan and lowered the jack a bit more down so it wasn’t pumped up so high.  We just set up the van, locked it up and headed straight to the pub for a late lunch.  Luckily they were still serving and we sat down to a good hearty meal for only $46 for us all including drinks. After the other nights cost I had to ask the publican if that was right as it seemed so cheap. 

You would think that these two had maybe had too much to drink.

There isn’t much in Alford.  Really it is just the houses and the pub so we headed into Wallaroo as Jason wants to buy a certain kayak and there is a shop there that stocks it.  The town is only 23km away from where we are staying so it wasn’t far.  Once there we located the shop but they didn’t have any of the kayaks in stock.  We just headed to the playground then to let the kids loose before driving around town.  There was another big jetty with what looked like a grain loading conveyer belt but no action happening at the moment.

Hamish helping Kayla down he slide - she was scared.

I love seeing them play together.

It was an interesting town and there were new canal front homes, and not just little ones.  We are thinking they are either retired farmers or miners!  The town was quite big but it was Kadina that was another 9km away that was obviously more of the central hub and had all the big shops.  We however chose to stay a little longer in Wallaroo and do our food shopping there.  I don’t know if that was wise as the shop was just packed in so tight that it made getting around hard as really only one trolley could fit down each row.

More beautiful old buildings.

I am guessing an old train station that is now the library.

We returned to Alford to put away all our shopping and we soon realised that our van didn’t feel as sturdy as when it is on a bit more level ground.  It wasn’t bad and we didn’t feel unsafe but we just thought that long term it wasn’t brilliant so decided we would move on the next day rather than stay another night.  The effort factor to hitch on and move to another spot didn’t really seem worth it and if we were going to hitch on we might as well move on.

The evening was a nice quiet one and to try and get Kayla to sleep faster, Jason took her for a drive.  Hamish and I had a good laugh sitting on the step of the van watching Jason go around and around and around trying to get her to sleep.  Obviously there aren’t many roads in this town and she wasn’t falling asleep.  Eventually Jason gave up and upon their return Kayla was smiling at Hamish and I like a Cheshire cat, almost saying Dad didn’t win!  Whilst the attempt to get Kayla to sleep wasn’t successful he was happy as our lovely friend the big spider had come back out and was sitting on the dash again.  This time Jason managed to convince him to leave the car (maybe squashed and in a wipe) but he is gone.

So since that didn’t work getting Kayla to sleep easily, we went to the backup plan – watching the tennis.  It worked a treat and they both fell asleep very fast.