Bitti and I headed to Port Vincent for a camping break before the school year starts. In my adult life I have never been west of Port Wakefield before so this was new territory for me. My friend, R, invited me to join her and her three kids, sharing a powered tent site. R’s friends would also be coming along, 2 related families. This amounted to 6 adults and 8 children all up. Outnumbered.
Summer has been mild in South Australia this year, but this weekend was set to be hot. I packed all the beach gear and made provisions for being hot as hell all day and night. This included purchasing my first esky! Previously I had borrowed my mum’s, or relied upon my friend’s portable fridge. Being new to esky packing I googled for advice and discovered that I should have frozen 2L bottles of salted water at least 2 weeks ago. Oops! Oh well, too late for that so I did my best and found 1L bottles, salted and froze them overnight.
Port Vincent is about a 2.5-hour drive from Adelaide, or FOREVER if you’re 7. Yes, Bitti has had a birthday since we last blogged! She’s now bigger and sassier than ever. Another purchase for this trip was a two-way radio set, as inspired by our friends on the last trip to Mambray Creek. So Bitti and I can now communicate while she roams the campground. Relief from worrying for me and more freedom for her. The next upgrade I will be making is to add roof racks to my car. With the boot fully laden Bitti’s now 20 inch bike simply wouldn’t fit and, because the frame’s small, nor would it fit on the current strap-on rack I have for the rear of the car. The Saris Bones had been an excellent piece of equipment for me when I was driving Bitti to childcare and then parking and riding to work. But it seems now I am transporting 2 bikes we need to upgrade the technical gear.
We set off at about midday on Friday, I had downloaded Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone so we listened to Stephen Fry read what I have read at least 6 times. Bitti’s favourite parts always involve the Dursleys so she was happy to sit back and enjoy Dudley having a pig’s tail bestowed upon him.
We had a break in Ardrossan, a place I have heard of often but have never visited, and grabbed lunch at the bakery. Bitti spent 29 minutes swinging on the longest monkey bar we had ever seen while I checked out the crystal clear view across the aquamarine water of the Spencer Gulf. R texted me that she was resting at Pine Point lookout so we bundled into the car to catch them. Then, before Bitti could wind up into a mania about how far it was, we had zoomed through the last 15 minutes to Port Vincent.
The foreshore caravan park is pretty small, but our tent site was generous, although with little shade. We checked in at 3 pm and set to work getting the tents up and organised. Somehow it was 5 pm before we knew it! Between us we had 3 gas stoves set up in a little camp kitchen so it was straight into dinner prep to feed the kids. R’s friends had arrived by then and set up their camp over the road, not visible from where we were but close enough that the older kids could go back and forth without us. Neither Bitti nor I knew the rest of our camping party so I expected Bitti to spend the first half of the trip being reticent and clinging to me. She surprised me though and immediately took to the eldest girl, G, and they were soon marching around the park with G’s younger cousins and C’s younger siblings in tow. I think she was encouraged by being very comfortable with C, who is an extremely friendly and reassuringly confident kid.
After dinner I took Bitti and her friend C down to the beach. We checked out pelicans and placed our gear amongst some rocks so the kids could go off into the very shallow water to play with an inflatable boat I nearly expired blowing up. After romping around in the water for a while, me a tug boat to them, we turned to see the rocks we’d stashed our gear near completely under water! Bitti pelted back through the shallows to rescue my bag, which contained the brand-new radios! Luckily I had put my phone in my pocket so everything was salvageable. Lesson learned! The tide comes in FAST.
The kids stayed up playing and we put them down at around 9 pm. I had to read a chapter of Harry Potter so it was more like 10 pm when Bitti finally nodded off. R and I stayed up talking longer than we should have, so in the end I got only a few hours’ sleep. But the first night is always a write-off. Despite being quite close the amenities block the caravan park was fairly serene after lights out. I could hear a man on the site behind us snoring, and occasionally some raucous laughter drifted across on the wind. The real blessing was that as soon as the sun went down it cooled off considerably. So we were not enduring a hot night at all, in fact we had complained it was chilly and I had sat up in my sleeping bag to keep warm.
All in all, a very promising start to our holiday! The next day held more beach action and a tie-dye workshop at 12 noon, then a free BBQ for the meat eaters.
Two Little Travellers 