Christene was so nice to us, making us breakfast, insisting on showering us with gifts and hospitality. It was hard to leave, but we had to go.

Christine Made us Breakfast

Marnie, Matt, & Christene

Posting a Thank You Card

We stopped by Kat and Johnny's place on the way to the costal road. They are to be married next weekend, and have a really nice flat with flowers everywhere and a lake in the backyard. They had some brothers over helping re-landscape the sides of the driveway. Around every turn and hill and bump, the back of the car would bottom out because its so loaded down with all our stuff!

Johnny and Joel	Admiring the Backyard Lake	Kat and Ness	Kat's Friend
Brothers Doing Some Landscaping

It started getting really hot on the way down to the southern coastline. It was betwen 35 and 40C. Joel's air conditioner is broken, so we had the windows open trying to get some air through the car to cool us down. But the air coming in was already super hot. It felt like we had the heater on full blast! It was brutal. We had to shut the windows, and block the sun with a dooner (blanket) and a tee shirt.

Driving along, there were huge, wide open fields covered end to end with sheep, and spotted occasionally with strange trees that looked as though their roots had come back up from the ground and spread out into a twist of branches. Matt reckons it was just dried and broken off branches. Sometimes it seemed like the trees were laying on their sides, growing in both directions. It was difficult to get a picture of it.

We saw, often, instead of grass, large fields of salt. One of them had a pink coloured lake. Not a good place to go swimming, since its made pink by the high bacteria content. Marnie tasted it to assure us that the ground was indeed salty.

Flowers in a Bowl	Mmmm... Yum	Sleeping in the Car	Coping with the Heat
Pink Lake	Tasting the Salt	Matt and Marnie by Pink Lake	Couldn't See Where He Was Going (dont click on this one)
Me Coping with the Heat	These Signs Are Everywhere

Luckily, it got cooler as we approached the shore. We saw a sign for something called, "The Granites" and decided to pull a U-ey and check it out. It was a wide open southern view of the ocean with dunes that reminded me alot of Wildwood State Park on the north shore back home. There were only three big, round, granite rocks in the water, the largest one just past the edge of the shoreline. When the waves pulled out, it left a flat, dry peninsula of sand, forming a bridge to the rock. And when the waves came in, the water splashed up the sides of the rock, and surrounded it. We walked along the strange multi-shade striped sand picking up enormous cuttlefish bones, and taking pictures of each other.

View of The Granites	View of The Granites	View of The Granites	View of The Granites
On The Beach	3.. 6.. 9 Seconds of Light	On The Rock	Checking Out the Dunes
The Photographer	Love on the Rocks	Hanging On to the Bottom of the World	Ness Balancing

In Kingston, there's a huge lobster. Matt says everthing here is "The Big This..." or "The Big That..." We had lunch there and saw some trees.

The Big Lobster

Pine Trees Near Kingston

We stopped again in Mount Gambier to see "The Blue Lake," named such because its so blue. Its not from tidybowl, as Matt suggested, but rather because its so much deeper than it seems. The sign explains how it was formed by vulcanic activity. It serves as drinking water for the nearby towns. It was so nice, we decided to stay there, and got food for breakfast (chasing a stray dog through the grocery store) and a cabin for the night.

View of Blue Lake	View of Blue Lake	View of Blue Lake	View of Blue Lake
Marnie and Matt Again	Setting Sunlight	Ness and Joel at Blue Lake	Marnie Taking the Previous Shot
Explanation	Ness' Favorite Picture	Capturing Matt	Sunset at Blue Lake

We had a drink, some toasted sandwiches and some laughs down at the pub. Joel explained the subtle technique of cow tipping and recommends that we give it a try next sleeping cow we find. Afterwards, we went up to a lookout in the pitch black and layed on the grass watching shooting stars in the freezing cold for hours. We should have brought a torch (flashlight) with us, but didn't and so had to choose our steps carefully down the steep hill and steps back to the car. I took my time, checking for ground with each step before putting my weight down and made it all the way back to the road stumble free. At this point, there was some light from the car, and I could easily see that my next step was the pavement. What I couldn't see was that it was a four foot drop to get there. Luckily I had the camera in my right hand, because I fell onto my left, scraping my hand and leg only slightly. It was a good laugh for the car ride back to the cabin.

Matts shorts stank (not for the typical reason, but because they'd been damp and mouldy for two days), so Ness wanted to put them outside instead. At that point, she discovered that the previous tennants had twisted off a key into the lock of the screen door. We tried with everything we had to get the key out, but it was held in by the tumblers. While the others had gone to sleep, Ness and I dismantled the lock mechanism onto the table to try to extract the key. I'd never seen the inside of a lock before, but I knew it aught to go back together exactly as it had come apart, or we might end up locking ourselves in! So I held my finger over the hole and tipped out the contents of the lock, one hole at a time into Ness' hand, not expecting there to be so many parts. It didn't matter anyway, because all the parts rolled together into a big pile on the table. We spent hours diciphering the combination of tumblers, spacers, rounded pins, and springs, all of various lengths. Eventually we figured it out and managed to get it working perfectly with the one good key we had. It was heaps of fun.