Yorke Peninsula

We left Gawler this morning to journey around the Yorke Peninsula and sadly we did not enjoy most of it in terms of scenery as the roads made you feel as if you had to hang on for dear life as if you were on a rodeo bronc and you certainly could not travel as fast as the road limit as the highways were atrocious in levels, potholes, cracks dips, bends or whatever . Each town we visited was beautifully presented, clean and many drivers waved which was great.  Most towns had limited evidence of life and we thought most of the exotic residences were vacant and were the holiday homes of SA people.  Not a lot of marine or bird life was evident and it reminded me of the days where cotton chemicals seemed to wipe insects and fauna from the area for decades!  Lots of signs about stopping mining and leaving the area to remain “natural beauty" although most of the land was cleared, windswept, stony what little number of trees were present were bent forward as badly as those in Eneabba in north west Australia.  Most of the areas were farmed for crops.  The saddest sights we saw were the many magnificent stone residences that were abandoned on farms which had begun to fall down. Having said that there were also a huge number of old ston houses that had been restored and were present in every town we went through.

We finally came across a town with an interesting story about a war hero - pilot Harry Butler who was the first to deliver mail from across the peninsula to Adelaide. This was Minalton and it was actually pretty busy.  We arrived at another large town, Maitland where we decided to book into the Showgrounds for the night!