Brice Hill Country Lodge Clare

We travelled onto Clare Valley a wine area again. We have a friend who has lived here for the past 6 years. The trip from Port Augusta to Clare was only about 2.5 hours so that was a nice and easy drive. Before you get to Clare there is a town called Snowtown it has a propeller on display from the windfarm turbines. This is also a town famous for its mass murders unfortunatly. The town is a very quiet place to drive through. Also going to Clare there is another large ...

... a phone call asked Mark if he also flossed Milton's chain!

Mark and I had a look around Burra and visited some second book shops - boy, if we had more space in our bags, there would have been some purchases. I also called my Dad for Father's Day in the local phone box.

We had our evening meal at the local pub which was very filling.

Early to bed for our 121km ride to Waikerie tomorrow and the start of another week in the saddle.

... We battled on but our form today was the best for the whole ride. Our speed wasn't great but our progress was steady. We reached Port Wakefield at about 2:50pm which was only half way to Crystal Brook. We had a good lunch and left at about 3:15pm. Then something wierd happened....

The road turned a fraction to the right and the wind had turned a fraction to the left and something that we had only ever heard about happened ...

... and the Snobs were a group of shopkeepers and merchants, both were ving for the same piece of dirt and finally they merged. What drew us to the town were the dugouts that you can still see, where thousands of Cornish, Welsh and English migrants, having come for the mine, lived in the side of the Burra creek bed. While we were in the town we couldn't miss Thorogoods of Burra which make good old fashion scrumpy cider ...

... dia 31 de Dezembro e tinhamos que nos preparar para a passagem de ano. :-) Foi sem dúvida uma das passagens de ano mais "interessantes" que já fizémos. No dia que chegámos foi-nos dito que no parque de caravanas iria haver festa de fim de ano com barbeque, mas apenas apareceram umas 10 pessoa, metade das quais com idade para serem nossos avós. De qualquer forma fizémos novos amigos, e, depois de algumas bebidas, divertimo-nos na mesma. :-) Ainda ...

Day 8 Woke up in the morning and had breakfast at Tanunda Bakery. We read on TORB that the coffee and food here was bad ... well, I agree with him ... The drive to Clare took about an hour, since it was almost 100km away. The drive was very scenic, and offered some of the best countryside views for the trip. Oh well, that aside, back to the wine trail ... Mitchell Wines Mr Must Love Dogs was at it ... again ... Very interesting ...

Our first WWOOF-ing experience!! We got a bus to the middle of bum-f**k-nowhere - Two Wells, where we were met by Bongo Pete!! Here we spent a week helping him make drums and all sorts of stuff for Womadelaide festival in Adelaide - we learnt how to string and skin djembes, tin drums, bongos and ...

... crawling out of the woodwork. It seems to be very important to talk knowledgeably about wine whether you actually know anything or not. The assumption seems to be that the more expensive your four wheel drive the more you must know about wine. In contrast, Balaklava is a central town in a grain growing district, just as wealthy as Clare but with shorter cycles of 'Boom and Bust'. Balaklava doesn't suffer nearly so much from the pretence and gentrification of Clare ...

... that kills me.

My boss, Ben, had arranged a car for me, a blue 4x4 "ute" which makes up part of his collection of vehicles, and which I was more than a little embarrassed to admit I couldn't use. Ben's mom, Pat, gave me a lesson on my second week in country, and I did very well between the winery and my house in Watervale, some 5 kilometers away, on the back road.

But when the demands of vintage, crushing fruit and 6am starts kicked in the opportunity for more lessons ...

... almost a third of the total fruit we'll process for the 2006 vintage. This year's harvest is compact and will probably last just 8 weeks, as opposed to last year's 12. Our work is accompanied by the bang-pop-boom of gas guns echoing through neighbouring vineyards in a vain attempt to keep the birds off the fruit.

When the fruit does come it's on the back of trucks or in 400 kilo container tipped into a receiver bin and fed through the crusher. Whites go directly ...