Penola and back to Adders.

So a quick hour or so drive from Robe is the town of Penola, it is the heart of the Coonawarra wine region. Also, it is one of the states oldest towns and you can see some of the old style architecture and living spaces from that era if you walk the couple of streets from the tourist information centre to the Petticoat Lane. Here you will see buildings of wood and corrugated iron, the most traditional of materials for houses in Australia. Penola actually has nearly 1.5 times as much rain a year as Warsaw, you would never guess though, when you are there in Summer.

The CWA building - Country Women's Association, a group found in most rural towns where women would get together to socialise, cooking and baking for charity, working in a volunteer fashion for the good of the community. A real backbone to the rural towns. Something my family have been involved in until the last generation.

Portrait in the Sharam cottage, and notice the wall, instead of removing the wall paper, all they would do was every year or two buy new paper and paper over the top of the old. It helped insulate the building.

Crazy cockatoo

Wine in the Coonawarra is famous for the red earth, Terra Rosa, that is present giving the red wines in particular a bold earthy flavour, which really makes some dynamic Cabernet Sauvignon. If you see a Coonawarra Cab Sav, it will be good.

Katnook is one of my favourites in the region

Famous Cab Sav vines

Majella always make lovely reds, but we even bought their sparkling white, it was delicious.

The size of Australian vineyards shocks many European visitors.

They just go for miles.

After our travels about and the wineries of Coonawarra it was time to head home, here you can see the rugged beauty of the Coorong.

A little panorama

We decided to not go down the highway instead going over the Murray River on a Wellington ferry.

This allowed us to pass through another wine region, Langhorne Creek

Here at Bremerton

And then at Bleasdale the home of cheap and cheery ports.

When home it was time to cook, so harvesting some basil was important

In the late afternoon.

Here, sadly, endeth the trip to the SE of SA :(

I recommend visiting SA, especially the wine region of Coonawarra, it is a lovely place and where there is wine, there is always good food and creative industries close by. It is beautiful and the wines are fabulous, you just need to get away from the city off the beaten track to see them.

To Robe and beyond.... SE of SA

We needed to get away and have a little holiday while in South Australia, having done Kangaroo Island last time, we decided to venture a little further southward, and went to stay in Robe. A surfing and fishing town about 4 hours drive south of Adelaide central. It is a beautiful place, empty at this time of year, but gets crazy busy at Easter and Christmas time.

You have to stop at a bakery when travelling in Australia for a pie and a can of ginger beer. This is at a Meningie on the banks of Lake Alexandrina

An interesting thing how the sides of a lake can be dry and barron!

There were plenty of Correlas about though.

As you keep cruising southwards about half an hour before Robe you reach Kingston SE, and the famous big crayfish (lobster).

It is pretty darned cool. Always gets me excited, and hungry.

Robe was found first by a Frenchman Nicolas Baudin (right) who also met the English explorer Matthew Flinders (left) in Encounter Bay

Nothing else for it, but on a hot day other than to sit in the beer garden of the Caledonian Inn and have a Coopers Pale Ale a must for a local lad.

Or a foreign princess

Robe is famous for its beaches

including long beach, 12km of unspoiled beach almost always empty

apart from these blokes

And these jellyfish

and some seaweed.