As we had arrived in South Australia with no other bookings apart from in Clare (due to the possibility of the SA state border being closed because of COVID-19), there weren’t that many options available to stay at short notice.

So we ended up in what we would call a ‘fancy place’ in Watervale – 15km away from our first stay in Clare, but still in the Clare Valley.

We arrived at our cottage and found two bottles of wine, fresh warm bread, eggs, bacon, and a whole bunch of other delicious goodies. The cottage was clean and spacious and set back from the road down its own gravel driveway. There was a small garden with an outside seating area, and nice big windows that made the whole cottage really light. We were pretty excited as it was the nicest place that we had stayed so far as Jazz Nomads.

We also discovered significant numbers of dead millepedes – apparently this is a common problem in South Australia – Portuguese Millepedes in great numbers! They were pretty easy to sweep up each morning and didn’t really bother us though.

Watervale turned out to be a small friendly place, and one evening as we were walking past a house we were recognised by ‘Sister Sue’ – who had been in charge of the wine-tasting we did at Good Catholic Girl cellar door. They invited us in to drink wine and eat snacks. We were very impressed by the friendliness of South Australia.

The small town of Leasingham was only 2km away, so we took the opportunity to go wine-tasting there at Claymore Wines and O’Leary Walker Wines (on two different days). We also managed a wine-tasting at Crabtree Watervale Wines – located just outside Watervale itself.

We did more wine-tasting on a day out walking the Riesling Trail (Watervale to Auburn and back), and we also visited Spring Gully Conservation Park and Red Banks Conservation Park.

By the time that we left the Clare Valley after a total of 12 nights, we had been wine-tasting at 11 different cellar doors, and bought 37 bottles of wine. (Yes, we did get a bit carried away).