Tuesday, March 4, 2008

Big enough to have a salad bar!

Feb 20th -22nd

Ceduna - In our minds for the past 11 days we had seen it as the end to our Eyre Highway adventure. This was the biggest town since Esperance - smaller than Esperance, but still bigger than Norseman; at this point, it seemed downright cosmopolitan.

It is situated on the coast and has a long jetty that is a regular fixture on all of these towns in western and southern Australia that are built on shallow bays. We spent roughly 36 hours in Ceduna before our big push to Adelaide. Our time here was thankfully uneventful, with of course the following exceptions:

Food: my, what a surprise. Both days found us repeat customers at both Bill’s Fish and Chips for lunch and the Ceduna Hotel/Motel right on the beachfront for dinner. They earned our business for the following reasons:
1) Bill’s fish are as fresh as they could come; some, if not all, are line, not net, caught. The silver, pink and gold fillets are laid out in small quantities in the display case. When that day’s fish are gone, you just have to wait for the fisherman.
2) The batter is tasty, but light. I felt like I was eating a fish fried in batter, not a batter-ball with a fishy center.
3) The hotel serves a decent feed. What brought us back was the diverse, fresh and unlimited salad bar. Good for the fresh veggies we had been missing, plus we could eat to our full volume, which is considerable.

The second reason Ceduna was of note was that our dear Austrian cyclists, Phillipp and Valeska, rolled into town a few hours after us. We both stayed at the same caravan park. It was just 10 bucks extra for our own self-contained trailer over a campsite, and after a lot of time outside it’s hard to put a price on your own enclosed space. We shared some beers, commiserated over cycling, and I was delighted to find out that they planning to head through Seattle to Alaska. I hope to put them up.

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