12th April was a chance for us all to get lost and then take lots of photographs while we got back on track.  Four cars headed off with four navigators each leaving plenty of room for disputes.  Tina turned up in a car on her own so rather than give her the advantage of going on her own and therefore not having any arguments she was invited to join Geoff and Elizabeth Doecke, my wife Lyndal and myself in our car to enable us to have five way disputes.



The first major hurdle was to overcome the first rather cryptic and poetic first instruction from Sandy.  Everyone else headed off while our highly intelligent crew sat motionless in the carpark wondering if all the others had been finalists in the Einstein Factor. 



“A short name has this place, to find a rhyme was hard

Off two words it is made, one you can find on a card

The Queen of Hearts, as well as the Ten

It is also the name of a little hen

The other you can dance around if you are game

It, and a post are one and the same”



Fortunately Sandy was still there and pointed us on the right track to…



The Red Poles Restaurant



This was a rather appropriate place for us to start as Geoff and I both had red shirts on.  See Photo.  Things were made extra hard because the staff at the restaurant knew nothing about the tour.  All the envelopes were found in the day book and Geoff, being the nice guy that he is, decided to help the other teams by putting the tour sign up.



Medlow Confectionery



This in the main street of McLaren Vale and again Geoff was the main centre of attention when he convinced the staff to feed him Fru Chocs some what in the same manner that servants used to serve the Ancient Romans grapes. This time I took the Photos hoping to embarrass Geoff at a later date.



Willunga Markets



I dropped my four passengers off at the markets and headed off to McLaren Vale to find a car park.  Well. Not quite but these markets are very popular.  I managed to reverse park into a spot just near the markets and found the others and also the next clue.  We could have been there all morning but we did spend our time and pennies before deciding to head off to…..



Blessed Cheese



Back to McLaren Vale for a visit to Blessed Cheese.  This was opposite Medlow Confectionery so Sandy obviously was trying either to get us lost or do lots of travelling back and forth.  She seemed to be succeeding with both.  There wasn’t a lot here, except cheese of course,   




Penny’s Hill Winery



This was probably the most photographic site on the day which meant that we spent the most time there with Geoff and I taking the opportunity to photographs of the winery buildings, a couple of old carts and rusty machinery.  The girls spent most of there time in the winery sales office.  Hmmmmmm



The Olive Grove



Again the best thing about this site from a photography point of view was not the site itself but the alpacas out the back.  Again we were there for too long but we realised this was not a race.   Well that’s what we said because we realised that we were running last.



Almond & Olive Train



Gosh!  How on earth were we going to get Geoff away from anything to do with trains.  Fortunately two carriages is not a steam train so we managed to move on without spending all our money.



Woodstock Winery



Finished at last.  “Last” being the operative word.  We all shared a brilliantly prepared lunch as talked at end about being lost and those “Cryptic Clues”  It also gave me the opportunity to photograph one of my favourite subjects, European cars.  A brilliant, red Audi TT sports. We must do this again some time and the photographs for the day out will be very interesting.

Peter Gibson