Day 71-73. 14th - 16th July 2024. Ceduna. Getting ready to Jetty-son..

From roadhouse to a caravan park situated right across the road from the foreshore. It changes your mood when the park is clean, neat, and you can see the water. We are counting the days down now with only a week before we are back in Ocean Grove. It is tempting to push through, but a rest stop before the final push of 1500ks is a good idea.

Ceduna is a small coastal town, with a long jetty, a massive modern pub, and not a great deal more. Watching the sunset over water from the Ceduna Hotel bistro was a nice, although a cause of consternation. Happy hour had $6 pints on offer, which is a tremendous deal in anyone’s language. However, I was unaware that a SA Pint is 425mls. How can we not have standardised drink sizes when the size is literally in the name of size? Even a US Pint is 475mls, but the UK and Australian Pint is 570mls. I need to find the German word for being pleased to get a genuine bargain but feeling slightly ripped off in the process.

Camp kitchens have been pretty quiet except in the bigger RAC parks we have stayed at. There have been some people using this one, but using it mainly to wash dishes. Meeting travellers from overseas gives an insight into how others view Australia. Someone that has had to spend 24 hours on a flight, deal with jetlag, and then travel vast distances in a short amount of time has a different insight as to what they want to see compared to Bob and Betty who have hitched up their van to go six hours north to be a few degrees warmer in winter.

One night here we met a couple from Denmark and got along famously, and broke the rules a bit for staying in the kitchen chatting past 10pm. They were interested to know what to look out for and were interesting to talk to about why they were doing their Australian trip. It was nice to have the broader chat other than “where have you been, where are you going, where you from”. In a rare connection, we actually got to know each other’s names. It was a pleasure meeting Jesper and Tina and nights like this was one of the things we wanted to get out of the trip.

We didn’t do a great deal here, bought some local fish and cooked it on the BBQ with some Venus Bay prawns, walked the jetty a few times and did a day trip down to Streaky Bay to check out the view down there. All pleasant enough, but we were all ready and packed the night before we left so we could get an early start.

Facilities: Ticking all the boxes in newly refurbished amenity block except for one. Showers that don’t have the walls going down all the way to the floor not only have the risk of shower water from another coming into your shower, but always have a the risk of if you drop the soap it can escape your cubicle and into someone else’s. If no-one is in that cubicle, you would have to escape mid-shower and go and fetch it. If someone IS in that cubicle, a game of soap soccer could ensue where them kicking it back may mean it bypasses you and goes into the other one beside you. I don’t fancy a game of naked piggy in the middle so you lose a point. 9/10.