Wrong Way Already!

Road Trip Day 1: 23rd May 2007

Taking a wrong turn before you've even left your home town is probably not the way you want to start a road trip between Gawler, South Australia and Perth, Western Australia but that's what I did. Can you tell I don't actually drive much around Gawler?

Perhaps it was because Blonde Rose and I had so much to do in the two days prior to leaving. Maybe my brain was a little bit fried? I simply thought a road went somewhere that it didn't thus, Rose got to see a bit more of Gawler that she hadn't yet seen.

For regular visitors to this site who haven't made the connection in previous posts, Blonde Rose is my sister. She's been on holiday in Gawler South Australia for the past 3 months. Hence all the sight seeing blog entries. Now we are both heading back to Perth by car, sight seeing as we go. If you drive straight from Gawler to Perth you can do it in about four days. Sight seeing included, we'll be on the road about two weeks.

We left quite late in the day (somewhere around 2pm) after having made a detour to get some tyres changed over. The goal was to get to the town of Clare, passing through Auburn (with a stop to look around) and a side trip to Mintaro to visit Martindale Hall (a building featured in the classic Aussie movie, 'Picnic at Hanging Rock').

Unfortunately the light was against us so we settled for stopping in the historic town of Auburn for the night. Auburn was originally a farming town but became a furoughfair for copper transportation when this was discovered at the town of Burra, to the north-east.

Auburn has a number of significant examples of heritage style architechture and was the birth place of C. J. Dennis (born 1876) whom was one of Australia's greatest authors. He is best known for his book, The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke, published in 1915.

Tonight we're staying at the Auburn Shiraz Motel located at the southern end of the town. I'm not a seasoned motel visitor so I don't really know what makes a good motel, however facilities at the Shiraz seem to cover everything you need and the beds were certainly comfortable.

Tomorrow, the goal is to make all the spots we intended to visit today but didn't. Then we'll try to finish at our first major stop, Broken Hill.

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