Murray Bridge

We left Mannum early & headed towards Murray Bridge & ended up being in town just after 9am. We decided to stay at a caravan park for a couple of nights & chose Avoca Dell Caravan Park. They allowed us to check in early & put us on a large grassy site overlooking the Murray River. We then headed into town for a look around. Murray Bridge is bigger than I remembered & now has a new Woolies & Big W. As we were in town so early we got to have a really good look around the area. It was starting to get hot so we headed back to the carvan park & watched some of the cricket in the air conditioning in the TV room, which was a nice change.

The next day I got up early & did the wetlands walk that is a 3.5km loop track near the caravan park that was really great. I saw heaps of water birds & wrens. It was a lovely start to the day. 

Early morning wetland walk above & below

Back at camp it was forecast to be above 40 degrees so we decided to go for a drive for the day. 

Heading towards Mt Barker

We headed west towards Mt Barker & saw a sign for the Beerenberg jam factory & decided to check it out. It is a huge factory where you can buy all of their products & also pick fresh strawberries. 

 We then decided to have a look in the small town nearby Hahndorf, we are so glad we did. This has to be one of our favourite towns in Australia. It is just gorgeous, with tree lined streets & all sorts of little shops including 3 German pubs, ice cream shops, cheese shops, providores, leather, alpaca & wool stores, gift shops, German speciality shops & much more. 

Hahndorf

We had a great time wandering the streets & of course had to have lunch at the pub for some traditional German sausage & pretzels, Yum. 

One of the pubs

We then had a look at Mt Barker & then made our way down to Strathalbyn, we than ran back east towards Wellington picking up some freshly picked potatoes for $5 for 5kg. We then cut back up to Tailem Bend & got some cheap fuel. As we started to head back up to Murray Bridge a huge storm was brewing with thunder & lightning, so we hot tailed it home because the trailer was open. We got there just in time before the storm hit only to find the lovely people at the caravan park had already shut our windows. We tucked everything away & headed back down to the TV room to hide out of the rain & watch the storm come in over the Murray. The rain kept up for most of the afternoon so we decided to head down the street to the local club for a cheap dinner instead of cooking. It rained pretty heavy all night, so we had a very wet pack up the next morning. Luckily it stopped for about half an hour for us to get packed up. There was big rain forecast for the next few days with the most rainfall seen for 30 years forecast, so we decided to head down to my grandmas at Bordertown to escape the rain. We stayed for 5 nights & really enjoyed being in a house during the rain. It was nice to have a decent shower, somewhere to cook out of the wind & we even watched a bit of TV. We then headed down towards the Coorong, more on that soon. 

Storm coming

Map courtesy of HEMA maps