Friday – March 21, 2025
Penneshaw, Australia
Today’s featured photo has nothing to do with where we are or what we did – Jan just likes these signs that are equivalent to our “YIELD” signs. So there you have it – now let’s talk about what we did today.
Penneshaw isn’t very far from our last port – Adelaide. It is located on Kangaroo Island South of Adelaide. The population of Penneshaw is less than 300. You won’t find any traffic lights here – just common courtesy as you drive (on the left). Our guide/driver today was Shauna. She had a lineup of a wide variety of activities for us beginning with a honey of a stop.
Island Beehive is a family owned business that specializes in an isolated type of bee – the Ligurian Bee from Italy. In the media there is a photo that traces the heritage of these bees from Italy to Kangaroo Island. Over the last couple years there has been a lower than usual amount of rainfall so honey production has been much lower than normal. In addition there was a major fire in 2020 that wiped out over half the honey producers on the island. The prior owner (his sons now operate the business) gave us a tour of the production facility and explained some of the efficiencies they have in place to minimize the time and effort to product honey and beeswax. In the media you’ll find a couple videos with him explaining beekeeping and honey extraction.
From Island Beehive we traveled to the town of Kingscote for a look around. We found a grocery store and bought something not found on our cruise ship – popcorn! Cobs Popcorn to be precise. Down by the shore and looking East we could see MSC Magnifica in the distance – there is a photo in media.
Next stop on our tour was Bay of Shoals Winery. We sampled several white and red varieties but none struck our fancy. We tend to enjoy sweeter wines than those we had the opportunity to taste. The location of the winery and vineyard was picturesque – you could look over some of the vineyard into the Indian Ocean.
Our next stop would be Emu Bay Lavender for lunch. We had seen lavender farms on Washington Island in Door County, Wisconsin, and looked forward to a comparison. Unfortunately, the lavender plants had been harvested recently so there were no blooms to be seen. We had a nice chicken wrap sandwich followed by a lavender scone with lavender jelly. I’m not a big lavender fan but both the scone and jelly tasted good.
I’m going to inject here some conjecture. The day was hot, some of the roads we traveled were dusty. One of the passengers on our bus wanted the roof vents open for better circulation. When the vents were opened, the air blasted me directly in the face – I had to use my backpack to divert it. I believe the encounter with all the road dust and pollen were the beginning for me of 2 weeks of misery ending with a visit to the doctor on April 4th. More about that later.
Following lunch we headed to the Emu Ridge Eucalyptus Distillery. In case you didn’t know, eucalyptus is a primary variety of tree in Australia. Many, many varieties. The leaves are harvested from bushes and oil from the leaves is distilled for use in many products. You can see many of those uses in the Emu Ridge website’s offerings. Emu Ridge is also a sanctuary for orphaned and injured wildlife. There was a single emu we saw in a fenced in area and while we were visiting a couple kangaroos came calling. You’ll find photos of the roos in the media.
Our final stop of this excursion was Pennington Bay Beach. The beach isn’t the greatest but the bay and views of the Indian Ocean were memorable. We lingered there a few minutes then boarded the coach to return to the tender. On the way back to the ship I took a couple photos of the houses on shore and the eucalyptus trees that tower over them. As we left the harbor we saw what we thought might be penguins on the rocks – turns out they were those pesky birds we had seen in Ushuaia – cormorants.
Tonight’s entertainment was a treat – Irish dancers. Kelsey is excited to see them – she likes Riverdance and is hoping their show will be like that. Couldn’t find a website for this troup but if you watch the videos you can see how talented they are.
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