At Home and then

Off AGAIN
We worked out that we've been home six weeks and been out and about four times.  That was on the way here to Port Hughes, on South Australia's Copper Coast.

Huge sites, twice normal size

This is a good time of year to visit this seaside village, with its fish-infested sea, its homely atmosphere and the aura of money wafting down the sleepy streets from the millionnaire's beach-front mansions.  At a mere hour and a bit from Adelaide, the three towns of the Copper Coast (Moonta Bay, Wallaroo and Pt Hughes)  have always been popular.  Even in the 1990s when the credit squeezed Yorke Peninsula and almost choked it, nobody really left it off their list of go-to-places to spend a January or two. Now the workers have retired and they have moved in to the best they can do. Some can do really well, too, and beach-front homes of two storeys are mandatory. So are blinds over every window to keep out the blinding westerly setting sun. Steel shutters, to discourage out-of-season visitors.

Note: nobody on the beach.

The beaches are legendary, clean and white, with such low rates of visitors in anything other than the January rush that the idea of a crowd is TWO. Fishing? A boat is great, but those prepared to wade out to wet thigh level on a  rising tide  will frequently land a feed, often of KG Whiting. 

Greg Norman's picture is not enough to sell the blocks close
 to the golf course.

The Moonta Bowls club has magnificent greens and rising membership; Wallaroo has an indoor bowls stadium alongside the Golf and Croquet facilities. Magnificent! Wallaroo Mines still has good greens and Kadina has the old school baking-in-the-sun set-up.  Mind you, all this development has taken several generations to get rolling, and there have been notable failures. Most recent is Greg Norman's Golf Estate, whose course, housing estate  and resort thing has finally simpered into snooze, with the golf course existing but the housing allotments simply not proving to be good enough value.

The Caravan Park is huge, with separate  sections. The front is for the noisy, young, dynamic creatures. Small sites close together add to the action-packed adventures of the sunburnt set.

The Sedate Seniors and Grey Nomads are directed (and can opt for) the Inland Section, where huge sites allow for those with hearing losses to imagine themselves alone, for those with a tent as well to erect it, and for those with a boat to keep it handy.

Wallaroo crayfish, best eaten... well, just do it!

Pt Hughes has a great jetty-watch Bistro and nearby Moonta has a supermarket and four or five pubs that all serve great food.  If you don't like one town there's another fifteen minutes away conveniently located for browsing, snacking, wandering about in or whatever. Kadina is big enough to have a Centrelink Office with excellent service rendered by intelligent and sensible humans, a police station that's open all day and three (count 'em) main streets.

Moonta Bay has great swimming, wading  and fishing opportunities. Shopping is a recognised local specialty sport.

Pt Hughes jetty, with about fifty hopeful anglers

Frankly, that's enough. It's not as though this is a long way from home, is it?

Here for three days of R & R.

Programme is flexible!