We booked a month in Middleton to continue CC’s recovery from her leg surgery. We picked it because it was cheap, and it was by the ocean (but mostly because it was cheap…).

Middleton is the suburb next to Goolwa Beach where we had stayed twice previously (in April 2021 and April 2024) – so the area was very familiar and we went back to a few places that we had been many times before – for example Port Elliot and Victor Harbor.

The location of the house was excellent – only one street back from the ocean, but the place was pretty ‘basic’. The furniture was ‘retro’ (meaning old and uncomfortable), which was not the best for CC’s leg. We resolved this by bringing in the chairs from the outside deck – which were better, but still a bit uncomfortable for CC’s leg.

It was a three bedroom house and so it was spacious enough for CC to have an office for when she went back to work, and also for me to have a separate bedroom so that I didn’t accidentally kick CC’s leg in the night. There was a lack of curtains or blinds in the extra bedrooms so it wasn’t the best place for sleeping for me.

This all wouldn’t have been too bad – but unfortunately the place was not very clean and so we decided that we had to clean the kitchen before we used it. We also discovered that the small bin in the toilet hadn’t been emptied for a LONG time… yes, there was mould in it – I won’t go into the gory details of what else was in there…

Another setback was the stairs leading up to the deck where the front door was. There was no handrail and the bottom step was HUGE! Normally this would be no problem, but with CC on crutches it meant that she couldn’t leave the house without my help to get down the stairs. We did eventually resolve this by building an extra home-made step at the bottom.

The first three weeks that we were there CC was off work recovering and so we got a big pile of books from the library for CC to read while she was stuck inside doing nothing. During this time CC was on crutches and had instructions not to ‘overdo it’. This meant going on very short easy walks only (with crutches) – so in the beginning we drove to nearby Horseshoe Bay a few times for a flat, sheltered walk along the bay.

As the walks got longer we did a few outings where we drove to the top of the cliffs nearby and CC walked slowly downhill for about 30 minutes.

During our stay in Normanville we had been inspired by the amazing Vanilla Slice at the bakery, and so we set out to recreate this experience in Middleton. Alas, we never found a Vanilla Slice anywhere near as good and we ended up eating a lot of cheesecake instead – including a ‘special’ homemade one made of yoghurt and biscoff biscuits (It was a trend on tik tok apparently…)

CC also had her appointment at the hospital to change the dressing on her surgery wound and remove the stitches. This DID NOT go well. They messed up the timing of the appointment and so she had to wait for over four hours. They then did a rush job and accidentally ended up leaving a stitch behind.

The new wound dressing was extremely sticky and it refused to drop off like they said it would. CC resorted to cutting off a few centimetres at a time as it peeled away. On top of this, the stitch that they left behind started to get painful and it took us about two weeks to work out what the cause was. We then had to go to a walk-in surgery and have the rogue stitch removed. CC was not impressed, but very relieved to have it removed. In fact she was so relieved that she kept the stitch as a souvenir!