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Wheels on the car go round and round..
We went driving today. It was decided that a tour of the Barossa Valley would be good, so M and I toddles off to the Barossa to look around at the wineries and do some wine appreciating. Except that we weren�t really inspired. We drove to a few towns, saw a few wineries, but really, there was nothing else which grabbed the imagination. It was like, Margaret River, without the cheese factory, bootleg brewery, chocolate factory, lolly shop� It wasn�t that flash.
We found that we got lost somewhere south east of Adelaide, not hard to do when we don�t have a road map to speak of, and found some perspective on distances. It was like, we didn�t realise we were out of Adelaide because there are so many towns dotted around the place at regular intervals, pretty soon, we found we were more than half way to the Victorian border. In WA, everything is so far apart that you know you are leaving a populated area and won�t see anything for at least another 200kms.
We hooned through the country side to get from one dodgy town to the next and pretty soon we were in the Clare Valley, which was a little more picturesque than I thought and I got a couple of great shots of old buildings.. I wanted to check out a few more historical sites, so after Clare, we went westward to check out this particular place called Rochester Historical site. It was slightly off the beaten track, so we made the long trek through a lot of treeless hills. I have to comment here that there are not very many trees in rural South Australia. I think as soon as it was settled, the farmers removed every tree from the state. No wonder they have issues with weather.
So we get to this historical site, and see - nothing
There was a plaque in the middle of this dirt car park, I drove around the car park and saw some bricks, and possibly some rocks. The plaque told us this was where some guy had built a house and school. We didn�t see the school till we had left the site, M was looking out the window talking about the rubble and I saw some rubble marked with a sign saying �Rochester school� I shouted �oh look there�s the school!� M replied, �Which bit of rubble? I didn�t see the sign and I think I was looking at the wrong pile!� *sigh*
So we have discovered that on this trip, South Australians mark the oddest things as historical sites. We�ve seen about 5 sites marked, which there�s nothing left, except a couple of rocks in a vague house-like shape to show that it had something historical about it.
We went to Kapunda. We went to look at the copper mine, which was just a lot of mountains of green and red tailings. Anything remotely interesting was fenced off with big signs. �Danger, open shafts� We walked around the site, found that some rubble piles were engineering works, or workers huts, but there was nothing left to actually see. They had one unfenced section so we walked down the bottom and had a look at a hole in the side of the wall, with some green tailings, and found out somewhere along the trail this mine was the first Open-cut mine in the country. We made it out of the pit barely alive, gasping for air thinking we need to get fit. We sat down for a rest, and found afterwards my ass was covered in prickles. OUCH.
We drove through Snowtown (the massacre town) and for such a quiet small town, it is amazing that so many people went missing and were murdered and that no one noticed? After hearing about it all on the news, seeing the town itself, the question has to be asked, why the hell did anyone not notice that something was wrong when 12 people disappeared?
We got home after a long long drive and flopped into bed. The end of another successful day, and the next day was to be our journey south, with the concert in the evening.