It was time again to head over to my sister’s place in Melbourne for a short visit before going overseas. We had done the trip there and back from South Australia the year before, and both times had used Horsham as the overnight transit stop. Via Horsham is the most direct route more or less (the total journey from Aldinga Beach to Doreen is about 780km – around 8 to 9 hours drive)

This time we fancied a change – so we decided to make the first day’s drive a ‘day trip’ along the coast – stopping at Malang, Wellington, Kingston SE, and Robe before our overnight transit destination of Beachport. This route is a bit longer than via Horsham, but more scenic (makes the total journey from Aldinga Beach to Doreen about 925km – around 10 to 11 hours drive).

We set off towards Wellington using the scenic back roads rather than the motorway, and were surprised to suddenly come to the end of the road at the Murray River. Yes, we hadn’t looked closely at the map and there was no bridge across the river?! Luckily there was a free ferry to make the short hop over! 🙂

After this minor surprise it was smooth sailing, and we stopped for short walks along the coast as we proceeded. We also made sure that we visited the famous ‘Big Lobster’ in Kingston SE – a place where we actually spent New Year’s Eve 2014 and learnt that locally it was called ‘Larry the Lobster’. It was good to see Larry again.

We arrived in Beachport at around 6pm and there was just enough time for a short stroll before it went dark.