Fleurieu Peninsula:

We left Adelaide and headed down coastline and passed nearby, but not through, some famous wine growing regions such as Reynella and McLaren Vale. Although we loved Adelaide it was good to get out of the city away from traffic.
There are quite a few beaches here and we called into Sellicks Beach. It is one of the few beaches that you can drive a car onto the beach. Big cliffs overlook the water and there are very few waves.

As we got further south the hills became rolling and very steep. The countryside was very green. As this area was settled early in the history of SA there are some very old buildings and I was reminded of England. Although you are very close to Adelaide you feel like you are very isolated. We passed through some very quaint villages until we came down some steep hills to Rapid Bay where there was a free campsite. What a delightful place this was!! Rugged steep cliffs at one end of the small bay, a lovely beach and a huge long jetty at the other end and a green, flat camping area in the middle. There was a limestone crushing plant on the side of the hill near the jetty but that is no longer used. The town had a few very old stone workers cottages (no longer used), an abandoned store and I think three local residences although there is a three teacher school that services the whole district.
Rapid Bay was the first place in SA to be surveyed by William Light who proposed it as a site for the capital and so the some of first settlers arrived here. We saw the rock with the initials WL carved by Colonel Light.
It was very hot but overcast so I went for my first swim for a long time in the refreshingly cool water.

The next day we went for a drive to Cape Jervis which is where the ferry goes to Kangaroo Island. We decided not to go there as it is very expensive to take the caravan over and the weather was overcast and unsettled.

Then we went onto Victor Harbour on the east coast of the Peninsula through a very scenic drive on steep rolling green hills dotted with contented cattle and clumps of green pine trees.
Victor Harbour is the commercialised part of the Fleurieu Peninsula which is a popular beachside resort with Adelaide people. They had a big schoolies celebration here in November. It is a very pretty harbour with Granite Island connected by a long jetty. This is where they took the goods onto the ships and brought in building materials and machinery. There is now a horse drawn carriage (a replica of one used) that takes passengers out to the island as it did in years goneby. On the island, a walk that circumnavigates the island with some lovely views. A fairy penguin colony lives out here and tours to the see the penguins operate some evenings. It was overcast so once again you didn't get the benefit of the blue sea.
We just got back to the car when we heard a warning for severe thunderstorms and over 100 knots winds coming our way so we raced home to batten down and get ready for the onslaught. The sky was very black and we did receive some rain and some strong winds in the night but not to that force. In the morning we heard that the Eyre Peninsula had been hit so the poor farmers who where just about to harvest their first bumper crop in many years had their crops damages. Adelaide was hit with flooding as well as many other areas. We were very glad we left there when we did.

We headed back to Victor Harbour the next day and then on to Port Elliot as we heard there was a very nice caravan park there. Port Elliot was a quaint little place with some very old buildings but because we were looking for the CP we didn’t stop. We could see the park couldn’t find how to get to it. It was at the end of a little bay called Horseshoe Bay so we went down there though some narrow streets and poor parking for caravans but we still couldn’t find how to get to it. By now tempers were rather frayed. We finally realized we had to go out to the highway to get to the CP only to find it was very expensive. That was the last straw so we keep going to Goolwa which is a lovely town on at the mouth of the River Murray.