It's A Tough Gig But Someone Has To Do It.

Clouds trailed mid-morning streamers of rain over Adelaide as I drove north.  Adelaide receded in the rear vision mirror and the salt flats of Bolivar came and went.  Greenhouses huddled in windbreaks beside the road, some trailing long streamers of shredded plastic in the wind.  Groves of olives gave way to wheat waiting to be harvested or wide paddocks of stubble dotted with round hay bales.

Clouds trailed streamers of rain.  The highway went from wet, to dry, to wet again.

Wind tugged fiercely at the bike, rocking the car from side to side.  Some hardy caravanners braved the wild cross-wind, bouncing their erratic way up the highway with all other travellers giving them a wide berth lest we be caught up in a wind-related caravan disaster.  Pelicans soared in the clouds and black kites tumbled exuberantly in the updrafts.

I stopped in Dublin to peruse the brand new amenities. Barely 60 km outside of Adelaide, Dublin was arid and stony with graveled nature strips and old buildings made of local stone.  I tried hard to appreciate what level of homesickness would lead no less than the 1876 Governer of South Australia, Sir Richard Graves MacDonnell, to name the town after Dublin, Ireland. Or maybe he was tired of naming towns and just stuck to recycling names from his country of origin?  I took a quick tour of Dublin, bearing in mind that it has, according to the Dublin History Group, the best butcher in South Australia. You can be your own judge of that, should you ever need meat when passing through Dublin, South Australia.

The Dublin Garage had seen better days. I suspect it is not on the 'best X in South Australia' list.

The Dublin Hysterical Historical Group meets here.

I had lunch in Port Wakefield which had the dual honour of being both the town closest to the tippy top of the Gulf St Vincent and the eastern trail head for the Walk the Yorke hike/bike trail which just happens to be on my to-do-one-day list.

Walk The Yorke wanders along on the other side of the river through the Clinton Conservation Park.

It was too cold and windy to sit at the picnic table for lunch.  I sat in the car, but a single silver gull set up a stake-out anyway.

Someone went to great deal of effort.

Leaving Port Wakefield.  Those are the hills of the Yorke Peninsula on the other side of the Gulf St Vincent.

I left the A1 and cut across the top of the Yorke, past tiny settlements dominated by wheat silos, skirted the edges of Kadina, and drove straight down to the waterfront at Wallaroo for an invigorating view of the waters of the Spencer Gulf and the white curve of Wallaroo's beach.

Wallaroo is a wheat export port, also dominated by silos.  Bulk grain carriers loiter out in the Spencer Gulf, waiting their turn to come in to the jetty.

The view from North Beach.

I received the operating manual for three new cats and waved a new set of home owners off on their adventures.  The cats, in the absence of their people, made themselves scarce. I sat on the verandah, contemplated my view, went for a walk and sent photos of my suffering to Roger.

It's a hardship posting,

truly a struggle,

but I'm willing to sacrifice myself.

And then I came home and watched the sun set.

Going...

going...

gone.