Today’s second day was calculated at 6 hours 57 minutes.

Royal Mail Hotel, Kingston SE breakfast room

Leaving early and enjoying a solo breakfast, the other people staying having not woken yet as there was no evidence of other people having breakfasted in the dining room I left. Kingston SE was quiet with no one out on the road yet at 8 am I seem to recall leaving.

My route today took me along the Princes Highway and then along the highway continuing into Adelaide.

Just outside Kingston SE and pretty much all the way to Adelaide I had very much a sense of the moors in England.

Everything has a very flat, windswept sense to the environment.

Also, like the drive to Kingston SE a sense of post-apocalyptic desolation.

Perhaps it's just that I was travelling in the off season and mid-week. But this has very much been a journey where I have seen very few people for an extended period of time. For more than an hour I saw no cars, not a living being save for sheep, cows and the occasional fox.

I think the lack of people and the isolation that I've seen thus far is what's the biggest difference from my trips up to Sydney, Brisbane and Canberra. Going along the Hume Freeway I was almost guaranteed to see some vehicles, mostly trucks.

As the Princes Highway rejoins the ‘main highway’ system away from the coast at Tailem Bend it brought with it more traffic and as I approached Adelaide proper a realisation of how much height it has to drop in order to get to Adelaide CBD.

That’s something I hadn’t really realised when I was looking at the satellite image and planning my route.

Of course it looks hilly, but I was surprised at how much descending was needed for the highway to get closer to sea level.

It wasn’t as much of a steep incline as the highway through Toowoomba or the Blue Mountains which come with percentage grade warnings.

But still I am somewhat concerned I may have incurred speeding fines as the road was continuously at an incline, this was something I wasn’t expecting.

The way through the city was more a passage through the inner suburbs of Adelaide, the solution to this by the residents who reside along Portrush Road seems to all have been to build high fences to keep out the road that is on their doorsteps.

I do wonder if the Adelaide state government is looking to build a bypass around the city. But the hills would pose something of an obstacle in devising such a solution. But I think with the increased traffic towards the ports it'd be something that would soon become necessary.

Though if you look at a sat-image of Adelaide there isn’t really any space where a bypass could be built easily. Or if one was going to be built it wouldn’t be remotely cheap.

Following my chosen route I was greatly pleased that I had thoroughly researched (looked on Google Street View) at the intersections that I had to go through along that route as it was most worrisome going towards them. So when I was driving along I knew where to turn for Gepps Corner and which right turn to take at Grand Junction (there’s a hard right and a soft right that’s possible from Grand Junction Road) with only one lane for taking either of these right turns.

Heading out of Adelaide toward Port Wakefield the landscape was surprising in how not dry it was. From the sat-images I’d looked at I thought it would be dry arid conditions. But no, while there was some sense of dryness it was mostly verdant throughout my journey. Even as I neared Port Pirie and the landscape dried somewhat there was still much greenery around. It was only mid-May, so not quite into winter enough for rain I would have thought to have much of an effect on the landscape.

I didn't really stop until I was about an hour outside Port Pirie and then it was just for lunch and after that lengthy amount of time not speaking to anyone I found that needing to speak to someone, to form words rather difficult. Like I had a cold or something and had trouble just asking for a sandwich, forming words was briefly difficult. Perhaps I need to talk to myself more or something like that.

After my brief stop I decided to continue on into Port Pirie, intending to have a look around. Fill up with diesel and continue on.

One thing, as I drove through Port Pirie (twice) was the layout of the town. It being a port and therefore not being the layout of the road going right through the town.

I didn’t actually end up filling up with diesel in Port Pirie, I drove past the first station, just because I was taking in the town, the second one didn’t have a working low flow pump, only hi-flow ones. That never works out well when you try to fill up a vehicle with its regular opening with a hi-flow truck-use nozzle / pump. So I just ended up filling up in Port Augusta. There was no real worries for me, I still had half a tank of diesel at this point, but I feel more comfortable filling up when I have the chance to do so, and am always mindful of distances and how they effect the price of fuel. I’m also paranoid about running out of fuel.

Port Pirie seems to be a town in transition, Maccas and Hungary Jacks both look like they’re new additions to the town, with the International Hotel (somewhere I had intended to stay, though no one answered the phone), there sitting as something of an anachronism, even more so than its Art Deco exterior presents to the world.

Leaving Port Pirie and continuing north towards Port Augusta the kilometres rolled along. The hills to the right undulated as I drove, lending an odd almost alien quality to the flat and becoming even more arid landscape.

Yet these hills were quite green, dark against the patchy, dry landscape below them.

There was a train line and I only saw one train travelling along it; it was quite long, for at least a couple of minutes, travelling at 110 km/h I saw only the carriages. Containers and also cars being pulled by two locomotives.

Travelling along the Augusta Highway I also had my first experience of overtaking B-triples and road trains. In order to pass in any good amount of time a truck doing 110 km/h I found out quickly that I needed to do 140 km/h. It could have been done slower, but as it’s only a single lane road that speed allows you to pass the truck and put some distance between the truck and you.

I always want to be sure I put a good couple of car lengths between myself and any truck I overtake.

One of the things that I became fascinated with during this part of my journey is power poles. Not something I imagine people often become fascinated with, some might say a blight on the landscape.

But they are a very necessary part of our modern life and have been for over a hundred years.

South Australia’s power poles fascinated me, they are not the T-shaped sort of pole. They’re trident-shaped.

It’s a very interesting design for a power pole. Indeed it’s an interesting shape for anything that isn’t a trident.

In order to get the trident shape they’d need to have engineered and manufactured them much more than the standard T-shaped power poles.

There were also other power poles I saw, also a three pronged design that came off the right of the power pole with a straight horizontal line followed by an angled line down.

Again there would have been more manufacturing and engineering to create this design rather than the T-shaped variety.

Driving into Port Augusta I was firstly intrigued by the path the highway takes into Port Augusta; along a levy between two lakes. According to my GPS that I was messing around with as I drove over it my height above sea level was -2 meters.

Port Augusta struck me, a bit like Port Pirie as a town that’s had some booms recently. It’s a small town, but one that’s had some expansions recently. Driving down Commercial Road it didn’t seem like a small town, it seemed like a busy, quite active town. Yet, later when I went for a walk down to the Woolworths it felt like this was a town that had expanded quickly and perhaps lost something. There seemed like there had once been a village atmosphere to this location but as time and growth has happened that’s gone. Though perhaps I’m reading it wrong, perhaps Port Augusta has always been like this. It’s always been the last big stop before the Nullabor.

My accommodation for my second night was The Hotel Flinders. Which was one of the places I stayed at which did have a website (the other was the Royal Mail Hotel in Kingston SE). The Hotel Flinders’ however had been created in the past 5 years.

Looking at it and looking at Google Street View it looked like a grand old lady of a building, and when I went inside it had a lovely old stair case leading up to the upstairs rooms.

Alas I wasn’t to be going up said staircase as the room I’d booked was out the back of the hotel.

Paying up front the lady at the bar also took my driver’s licence details and my credit card info “in case any damage happens to the room”. Understandable I suppose, but does suggest that they have had past experience where they need to ask for this info.

It was a manual flip-flop card machine where they use carbon paper to take a copy. I was assured they destroy it after my stay.

I didn’t think anyone still had those manual machines for credit cards. I suppose if it works there’s no point in changing it.

The rooms were at the back of the hotel, I’d assumed that from the website and from looking at the sat-images of the hotel as I’d asked if there was off street parking there.

There were 5 rooms at the back of the hotel in a motel-style arrangement.

I had room number 3.

Pondering the space where these had been built I did begin the wonder if the space was where the stables would have been.

It’s certainly the right shape for where they’d have been out the back of the hotel.

The building however wasn’t original, I would guess that the building had been constructed in the 1950s or 60s. The bricks that were on the balcony between the rooms and where the car park was definitely suggested 60s to me.

Compared to my previous night’s accommodation the accommodation at The Hotel Flinders was really quite good. No shared bathroom, flatscreen TV (though it did need retuning to be able to get the ABC), tea and coffee facilities and a fridge (though I couldn’t get it to work).

The bathroom wasn’t amazing, it’s basically a space that could be a cupboard but it has the necessities. A toilet and a shower. The basin was outside that space.

The double bed was comfortable and there was even a table and two chairs in the room. These were tall ‘cafe style’ chairs and table, but perfectly serviceable to sit at, write some things, ponder the universe or have a cup of tea. Actually a mug of tea, no silly little tea cups in this room, two proper sized mugs.

My meal later that night was in The Hotel Flinders’ dining room. A really grand old room that had been renovated very well and it had a nice grand sense to the space.

The only downside to The Hotel Flinders is not really a slight against their service at all. It’s against whoever it was who parked in the car park in front of room number 1.

Lots of revving of an engine early in the night, they departed and then returned with much grunting and revving of their engine. I thought perhaps it was them doing deliveries of pizzas as I had looked through the book in the room and that had mentioned something of this. But I’d not seen any evidence around the hotel that they did anything like this.

Then later in the night it all went a bit...odd. Actually odd is me putting it lightly. There were voices outside that I could hear and two guys talking and walking around. Eventually I decided to get out of bed and peer through the wooden blinds on the window. It looked like two guys trying to break into one of the cars.

For a moment that’s exactly what I thought they were trying to do, and I thought that my car might be next, though I was more worried able them fucking up my car in some way rather than them actually succeeding in breaking in. I once unlocked my car with the key rather than the key fob and accidentally set off the alarm.

Also, they would have to be the most brazen or incompetent car thieves in the world as one of them had a high visibility vest on and the other wasn’t very good at breaking into the car.

At first I thought that of these two guys one of them was the owner, having locked his keys in his car. But, having got it open somehow, I didn’t sit at the window like some private eye watching for the whole time (though did take a few photos just in case something nefarious was going on) another guy was actually sat in the car talking to the other two guys. From his body language he didn’t seem like he’d been locked out of his car, or relieved, or thankful that these two had helped him get into the car.

It wasn’t something that I mused on much further as the guy in the high visibility vest and the other guy left in an 90s Holden Commodore and the guy whose car had ben broken into also left I allowed myself to drop to sleep.

Reflecting on this day’s drive I think I enjoyed today the most. The drive from Kingston SE along the coast was windswept and isolated, I saw very few cars, yet it was fascinating.

Likewise as I left Adelaide’s surrounds heading north there was hardly any civilisation, yet this emptiness was equally interesting.

Also neither of these drives was particularly difficult, having put my car in cruise control I didn’t need to constantly watch the speedo to remain at 110 km/h. I could enjoy the scenery roll past.

Update 2020:

Looking at The Hotel Flinders on Google Street View it appears they have installed remote gates, which would probably assuage some of my concerns regarding parking here.