Adelaide to Sydney Road Trip - The Road Less Travelled

Granted, it was a fairly unusual decision to visit Adelaide to cross paths for just a couple of hours with my Swedish friends Micke and Ellis, who had been in Australia for a couple of months by that stage. But I do love an excuse to travel, and that was the earliest I could get to them.

And they brought Cheez Doodles out here for me, so I really had to see them.

Only kidding. A little. Of course I would have seen them if they didn't bring Doodles. Probably. Oh stop!

Even though they were flying the long and arduous route home the next day,after making a temporary home with their two delicious kids, Norton and Aprilia, they hosted a little dinner party for us. I was most impressed as I am fairly useless when it comes to prepping to fly, especially with kids in tow.

So long is the time between doing and blogging for me that I am now looking forward to their return at the end of this year - this trip was the end of July 2015.

That night we stayed at The Watson. Great service, modern styling and comfortable.

The plan was to drive back from Adelaide, through the middle so to speak, as against the outback road or coast road that we had followed on our previous round trip.

Our first photo stop, near Millbrook...

and the next one was the Lyndoch Lavender Farm, which smelled delicious! We stocked up on lavender honey, lavender mustard (yup, really yum), lavender chocolate, and a few lavender plants too.

With two photographers in the car, you tend to stop quite a bit, just not at any of the regular pit stops.

We crossed the Murray by car ferry,

and stayed the night in Mildura.

I'd wanted to linger and check out the area the next morning, I hear Mildura has some great sights, but Sonny had other plans, so all I got was breakfast and he drove straight out of town. At least the breakfast was impressive to make up for missing out on other things. If you are in Mildura, check out The Wooden Door.

It's opposite the cool hair salon...

So, we raced through the countryside, barely stopping for anything as Sonny wanted to get to this lake. Not satisfied with the view he had, he decided to spend about an hour off-road on top of that. He was certain it was salt, and worth it.

I'm not totally convinced it was worth missing any chance of seeing anything else that day, but I did get some pretty pictures.

Lake Tyrrell.

That night we stayed at 1860. So named, as that was when it was built.

It's a really lovely place to stay, especially in winter, with it's open fire and frosty morning. Romantic too, if you're into that sort of thing.

I do love a bit of dead tree in a lake. We stopped here with some bread, cheese and wine for lunch.

Then traveled uphill to Thredbo.

There is an outdoor pool and spa at the Thredbo Alpine Resort. That, and it's proximity to the lifts are the only reason you would stay there. You know when you read reviews and people say the walls are paper-thin, etc, and you think they must be really fussy people? That's not the case with this place. Hearing a conversation being held at normal volume from the room next door is not really how I want my holiday to be.

But I did swim in the pool. Actually. I built up to it by hitting the spa first, and I left my beanie on while in the pool!

Sadly, my joints are too shit to snowboard now, so I tried my hand at a bit of walking on tennis racquets. It was actually quite fun, but the bosses of Thredbo are very restrictive about where you can and cannot go in these puppies. Bit of a shame really.