Melbourne to Adelaide - Inland Route

During the winter school holidays this year we drove from Melbourne to Adelaide for a short city break. There are two main routes you can take. The most direct route is inland and about 8.5 hours of driving time. The scenic route is along the coasts of Victoria and South Australia and includes the famous Great Ocean Road. We decided to drive the direct route to Adelaide and the scenic route back to Melbourne. 

I suppose you could drive the direct route all in one day, however we decided to break up the trip with one overnight stop. We figured 4-5 hours a day of driving would be enough for the kids. We decided to stopover in Naracoorte for the night - no particular reason why, it is slightly out the way compared to stoping in Horsham or Bordertown, but I think I couldn't find any suitable family accommodation as I left booking this night's accomodation pretty late. Naracoorte is just inside the border of South Australia, and a little over halfway between Melbourne and Adelaide. It meant that our first day of driving would be a little over 5 hours, and the second day would only be about 3h45.

We left at about 7:45am on a Saturday morning for our trip. Ella set up her own little sanctuary in the back seat, where she read her book quietly for the first 45 minutes or so of the ride. Yes that is a stuffed orangutan from IKEA hanging off the car grab handles. 

Our first stop was at a McDonald's in Ballan, about 80km outside of Melbourne. We already needed a bathroom break and figured some hashed browns, egg McMuffins and coffees would hit the spot. There was a play area in the McDonald's but it was absolutely FREEZING out and so we made this a pretty quick stop, refuelling on grease and caffeine before hitting the road again. 

Our next stop was in the town of Ararat, about 120km from Ballan. We stopped for a play at a playground where we had a bit of blue sky before it starting raining. The whole day it was very windy and raining on and off, so it was good that we had a short spell of decent weather where the kids could run around and get a break from the drive. 

During the final leg of the drive for the first day Ollie had a big sleep and Ella dozed here and there so we didn't bother stopping until we got to Naracoorte. We drove through Horsham and Halls Gap, which is the entrance to the Grampians National Park. If the kids were a bit older or we had more time, this would be a great place to stop and explore for a few days. However it does kind of remind me of school camp, as back in 2016 and 2017 I had to spend a week in the Grampians for Year 8 camp - not the most fun memory of my working career!

We arrived in Naracoorte around 2pm and decided to check out the Naracoorte Caves before heading to our motel. The caves are a World Heritage site, and contain fossils from around 500000 years ago. There are a few different caves to explore, but all except one must be viewed with a guide. It was recommended for us, with young kids, to just explore the unguided cave so we did that. It was probably the right decision, especially with Ollie - he'd be difficult to keep focused for a whole 60 minute guided cave tour, though I think the other caves were more beautiful/interesting. Still, it was a fun and different experience and Ollie kept up picking up rocks, telling us he was collecting fossils. 

Besides the cave, we could explore the Wonambi Fossil Centre where you can walk around in a recreated scene from 500,000 years ago. 

Outside there was a great nature playground that we spent time at before it started raining again.

We arrived at The Avenue Inn, our lodgings for the night, around 4pm. The motel room was tiny but modern and clean, so that was all we really needed for the night. It is a family owned business, and the owners were so lovely. We haven't really stayed in a motel before with the kids, so when we first got into our room Ella exclaimed "is this IT?!!!" She was clearly not impressed with the lack of space. However the kids quickly realised that they had their own adjoining room with their own TV, so they were happy to shut their door and play/watch TV while Andy and I chilled out for a bit.

For dinner we went to the restaurant adjoined to the motel and it was very good. Bonus points as there was a little cubby house outside on the patio, so even though it was too cold to eat out there the kids were happy playing outside on their own until our food came. 

Everyone slept well though we (the kids) woke up super early. There is a half hour time difference between Victoria and South Australia, so even though it was 6am to us Victorians, our watches said 5:30am as we were across the border, and any time before 6am just feels ridiculously early. Desperate for something other than instant coffee, Andy headed off to the only place open at that time... McDonald's! He came back with some hash browns as well, and I must say, I'm not a huge McDonald's fan but geez those hash browns are tasty! This was our second day in a row of McDonald's, so the kids must have thought they'd hit the jackpot. 

The funniest thing about the motel is we were directing Ollie to a light switch, and we told him it was "over the microwave". He was like "what's a microwave?" which I found hilarious. We don't have a microwave but it's never occurred to me that Ollie wouldn't even know what one was.

After our hash browns along with some instant porridge we packed up the car and were on our way by about 8am. We had under 4 hours of driving to get to Adelaide which didn't seem too bad. It is a BORING drive though. We also had A LOT of rain and wind that morning so a lot of the time our drive just looked like this:

We made a quick stop in the town of Keith for a coffee and snack, and came across the cutest café called Henry and Rose. Part café, part homewares store, this place had a good range of food and coffee along with a cosy indoor fireplace. It was a nice surprise to come across excellent coffee and such a lovely place in such a small town in what seemed like the middle of nowhere. 

Half an hour later we came to the town of Coonalpyn where there is a roadside "Waffles and Jaffles" shop on the side of the highway, run by a Belgian expat family. Of course we had to stop and try them out, and they were delicious!

Across the road were painted silos, part of the Australian Silo Art Trail. There are painted silos across Australia, as an initiative to promote tourism to regional towns across the country. The silos in Coonalpyn were painted in 2017 by artist Guido van Helten. It is titled "Hope for the Future" and features five primary school children from Coonalpyn and represents "growth and creativity, community spirit and local identity". 

 

We spent about half an hour here, eating waffles and running around the silos. Ollie and Andy even made a bit of nature artwork:

The rest of our drive was pretty uneventful. Ollie slept most of the way, so we didn't stop again. We drove past a Pioneer Village and through the German town of Hahndorf, thinking we might stop, but the rain and sleeping child put us off. The last hour or so of the drive was a bit more interesting as you drive through the Adelaide Hills... it's no longer just a flat road through fields. We were treated to a beautiful rainbow that I managed to photograph as we were leaving it behind.

We arrived in Adelaide around 2:30pm, having survived our first major road trip with the kids relatively unscathed! I have to admit here that Andy did ALL the driving so it was probably much easier on me than on him. The kids were really, really good though, keeping themselves amused the whole time without the help of any screens, so I feel like it was a parenting win.