Aspendale to Adelaide

Tuesday, September 10, 2013

After a photo-op with the Hall-Konstandakos family – before the girls went off to school, we set out for the 2-day drive to Adelaide. Pleasant enough.

Given we reached our destination for the day, Mount Gambier, around 3:15pm (there was a half hour time change), we had plenty of time to visit the local South Australian ‘Transport, Travel and Motoring’ Department, to get the necessary paperwork for our car in SA. We had called them some days ago and were told to do this upon entry into the state. So there we were.

We presented our issue at the counter and were assigned the ‘number 2’ in the office. She had never had this query before and she promptly went to work finding out what the requirements were. Shortly after that the ‘number 1’ (Tony Wilson) of that particular branch was involved and we couldn’t help but sense that they were all a tad excited about getting one of these :). We were amazed with the level of good service we received. After learning that we did already have the necessary documents for Victoria, they dug a little deeper and told us that because of that we didn’t need anything extra for South Australia. We suspected that already but it wasn’t very clear on their website. Tony confirmed that particular info was not on the website. He then printed out a copy of the relevant laws for us to keep, in case we’d encounter police who weren’t aware of this. Very nice! Thanks very much to Tony and colleagues for making this one of the best experiences in a registration office anywhere!!!

We stayed the night in the Blue Lake Holiday Park campground.  This was the second night of camping in Australia and clearly we are still working out our systems.

Camp 2 at Mt Gambier. Everything deployed for wet weather.
Wednesday, September 11, 2013

It bucketed down during the night but our tent held up and we stayed dry inside. A very good test. We set off in the direction of Adelaide.