The next morning we set off at 10am to go to the Clare Valley. I had arranged for us to stay with a family who ran a B&B. Trying to find cheap accommodation in Clare proved to be more difficult than I had thought. The caravan park was fully booked on most weekends, the local pubs wanted $75 a night which was pretty much what we would be earning in a day and so when I phoned Brian and Yvonne the owners of Bryvon Homestay they kindly offered us accommodation of $100 for the both of us per week a lot cheaper than then $100 a night they were asking for on their internet site. She let us have it cheap because we would be there for about 5 weeks and explained that we would be grape picking and therefore not earning much money. We arrived at Penwortham (just outside of Clare) at 4.30pm and met Brian and Yvonne. They were a lovely couple who were retired. They had their daughter and her children living with them but in a separate part of the house – the double garage had been converted to accommodate them.
The property was large and was actually designed by them with the help of an architect. It sat high above on a hill surrounded by 10 acres of land which consisted mostly of trees and bushes and as we found out later a family of kangaroos. Yvonne was telling us that the last time they had rain was back in December which meant water was quite precious and therefore our shower times were restricted to 5 minutes each. The other house rule as such was to try and limit rubbish. The whole family shared the rubbish bin and so it tended to fill quickly and there was no other place to take rubbish so trying to condense any packaging etc was a must. It was interesting to live by these rules as we had never had to have restrictions on anything before.
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