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Last Updated on 23 May 2025
A few days before leaving for our long weekend trip to South Australia, Callum and I went to pickup a roof rack (the only way we were going to fit 6 people and all their camping stuff in the Patrol). The plan was for us to quickly put it on the car during Cal’s lunch break and then he’d be able to go back to work for the day. This proved very ambitious.
The roof rack itself was over 50kg and all the brackets and metal bits to hold it in place were just wily-nilly in the box, along with a huge bag of assorted nuts and bolts. All of this without any labels or instructions. We spent an infuriating afternoon trying to get the rack onto the car– even after we finally understood the configuration, I put all the nuts on upside down and we had to redo them. Oops. Who knew there was a wrong way to put nuts on..
After all that, we leave Friday night with 6 of us packed tightly into the car and drive towards South Australia for an extended weekend of fun. It’s about a 6 hour drive to get to Robe, a beachside town with sand dunes that Cal wants to drive the 4WD through, so we sleep at a campsite along the way Friday night and wake up fresh to continue the drive Saturday morning. Along the way, we stop at several wineries in Coonawarra and Adelaide Hills, where we all make some purchases that we later drink that night at the campsite along with an assortment of cheeses and dips.
In Robe, Cal does get to enjoy his beach drive, but the Patrol actually gets stuck fairly early on and the boys all have to push the car to get it out, so that’s the end of that.
By late Saturday, it’s another 3 hours to Oakbank, a small town just outside Adelaide where we will camp for 2 nights while we enjoy bulk boogies at Groovin the Moo on Sunday.
We all have a great time at the festival and are thrilled with the low crowds, especially compared to the other Groovin the Moo locations in Bendigo and Canberra that sell out immediately and are absolutely packed with people.
After a bit of recovery on Monday, and a wonderful time in the little Bavarian wine town of Hahndorf, we are back on the road to Melbourne and back to work on Tuesday.
