Day 118 23 days to go. Distance today 140km total 10837km. It’s 6.30km Friday 2/11/2012 Redhill. How funny’s this…. After setting up camp I wondered into town to have a wash at the public toilets and grab a diet coke at the pub for a bit of company. This fella came up and said…’How’s that fencing going?’ Apparently I got a double working out at one of the farms doing some fencing work.’ His name is Allan and he’s the husband of the woman I met when I first arrived and went to the local store to find out if there was somewhere I could camp locally for the night. She was soooo lovely…’Yes of course love….just head up the road a bit following the river and find a spot anywhere along the bank after the bridge, and use the public toilets to clean and water up….’ I love small country towns and folk. Talking to Allan I found out that the population of Redhill is 200 including the neighboring farms. It’s such a tiny dot town but with beautiful heritage homes made of sandstone and so well loved. There’s grapevines growing out over each of the business verandahs in the main square and I grabbed so cool photos when I fist arrived. I only stopped ’cause the kms worked for today and it’s turned our to be a real precious find just a km off the A1. Allan was showing me photos hung in the pub of the ol’ farming larakins who have long passed away but still part of the town’s heritage. Their first names are written about the old frames and they were all smile lines and weathered with slouch hats. Very cool!! The community is nowadays mostly wheat farmers with the pub and his store the only real shops still operating in ‘town.’ A handful of farming folk were coming in now for their Friday night social bash at the pub and they were setting up the raffle wheel for their ritual fundraising. The money tonight goes to their Melbourne Cup day next Tuesday. Allan was saying that the towns are about 8 miles apart as they were originally stops for the bullock coaches that needed to be watered every 8kms during their journey’s from Port A to Adelaide. Him and his wife have been here for about 30 years and he laughed saying they’re only now being seen as true ‘locals.’
It been an overcast day with not too much wind and beautiful conditions for riding. The road is awesome and I’ve had a good quality shoulder to ride on for the most part. The scenery’s been stunning firstly with the Flinder’s ranges folding across to the North. The road has also hugged the coast passing port towns. The fields in between the ranges and coastlineline are mostly yellow wheat fields and harvesting has started with huge machinery busy at work. It obviously gets really windy in the area as there’s been a line of wind turbines on top the small range that has hugged the coastline. So I think we’ve been pretty lucky today to have a quiet day in that regards and pretty nice conditions to enjoy the scenery in this stretch. Hopefully tomorrow we’ll get to Adelaide another 160km away. I’m pretty hungry so it’s time to feed the starvs and tuck myself into bed for an early night. It was so windy again last night in Port Augusta or ‘Port Allgusty’ as Rube called it when we waved it bye byes this morning. Allan donated $20 before we headed so thankyou mate it was really cool and interesting talking and meeting a true Redhill local at our pub stop. It was good to have a social fix over a diet coke yay. Cash donations $2530. Talk soon x
shecyclesolo 