The Mid North of South Australia: a lap most tourers skip on the way to somewhere else

We'd towed through Peterborough four times before we ever stopped there properly. Every trip it was the same story — up the Barrier Highway, quick fuel, quick pie, eyes on Broken Hill or the Flinders further north. Then a few years back the trailer coupling started grumbling somewhere near Yunta and we had no choice but to sit still for a day. Turned out sitting still in the Mid North of South Australia is a pretty good way to spend a week, not just an afternoon between two better-known places.

The Mid North doesn't get spruiked the way the Flinders Ranges or the Eyre Peninsula does. It's the bit in between — Clare Valley wine country in the south, the Southern Flinders foothills further north, and a scatter of copper and railway towns that most people only know from a road sign at 110 km/h. That's exactly why it's worth the detour. Denise reckons it's the only part of SA where you can drink a decent shiraz at lunch and be parked at a free camp with a view of red gums by four.

Starting in Clare Valley, not just passing through

Clare gets treated as a wine-tasting day trip from Adelaide, which undersells it badly for anyone towing. The town itself sits on Main North Road with a proper IGA, a mechanic if you need one, and enough cellar doors within a short drive that you could spend three days and not repeat one. Sevenhill, just south of Clare, has the old Jesuit winery and a genuinely lovely bit of bush behind it if you're camped nearby.

What most vans don't know is the Riesling Trail — an old rail corridor turned into a walking and cycling path that runs almost 30 kilometres between Auburn and Clare. You don't need the van for it, just a folding bike or decent boots, but it's the kind of thing that turns a one-night stop into three. There's caravan parking in most of the small towns along it and nobody seems to mind you leaving the rig for a few hours while you ride a section.

The copper triangle towns nobody name-drops

Burra, Kapunda and Moonta together made up what the old maps call the copper triangle, and Burra in particular is worth more than the ten minutes most tourers give it. The main street still has the old miners' cottages, a proper heritage trail with a key you can borrow from the visitor centre, and enough history signage to fill a wet afternoon. We stayed two nights at the showground on the edge of town — a small donation, power available, and nobody hassling you about check-out times. That's the sort of stop the grey nomad grapevine passes on by word of mouth rather than an app.

Further north, towns like Terowie and Peterborough carry that same faded-railway feel. Peterborough still has three different rail gauges meeting in the one town, which tells you everything about how important this corridor used to be before road transport took over. The steamtown museum there is worth the entry fee if you've got kids or grandkids travelling with you, and if you don't, it's still a decent hour out of the sun.

Where the Southern Flinders actually starts

People think the Flinders Ranges starts at Wilpena, but the southern edge of that range system runs through the Mid North well before you get anywhere near Hawker. Mount Remarkable National Park, near Melrose, gives you a proper taste of it — steep gorges, river red gums, and gravel roads that'll rattle a poorly packed van but nothing a well set-up rig can't handle. Melrose itself claims to be the oldest town in the Flinders Ranges and it wears that history casually, not for show.

If you're eventually pushing on to the main Flinders event, this is a sensible staging point. We'd suggest a night or two around Melrose or Wilmington before tackling the run up to Wilpena Pound, rather than trying to do the whole thing in one long day from Adelaide. Towing that stretch tired is how people end up putting a dent in a guard rail they didn't know was there.

Free camps and the etiquette that keeps them open

The Mid North has more than its share of council rest areas and riverside camps that don't show up on the glossy tourism maps. Gladstone, Georgetown and Jamestown all have free or donation-based camping within a short walk of a pub, which suits us fine — Denise likes a counter meal after a day of driving and I like not cooking. The rule we stick to everywhere, but especially here where the towns are small and the goodwill matters, is the same 24-hour courtesy that keeps these spots available for the next rig through. If you want the long version of why that matters, we've written about it separately in free camp curfews and stay limits.

None of these towns are set up for a hundred vans a night. They're set up for the handful that actually stop, spend a bit at the bakery, and move on without leaving a mess. That's a fair trade and it's the reason these free camps still exist when plenty elsewhere have been shut down by councils tired of cleaning up after people who couldn't be bothered with a shovel and a bit of common sense. I've said my piece on that before and I'll leave it there.

Getting the timing right

Autumn and spring are the sensible windows. Summer up through the Mid North gets properly hot — we're talking mid-to-high thirties for weeks at a stretch — and the shade in a lot of these small towns is limited to whatever the main street verandas offer. Winter's fine for touring but the Clare Valley wine crowds thicken up around long weekends, so if you're chasing quiet cellar doors, avoid those dates specifically.

We reckon a week is the minimum to do this properly without rushing — two or three nights in Clare Valley, a night or two around the copper towns, and a couple more staging into the Southern Flinders. Add another few days if you're continuing on to the Oodnadatta Track or up through the guts of the Flinders proper, because by the time you're at Wilpena you'll want the rig serviced and the tyres checked rather than doing it on the run.

A small gripe, for balance

I'll admit the visitor centre signage in a couple of these towns oversells what's actually there — Burra's heritage trail is genuinely good, but a couple of the smaller "attractions" flagged along the way are little more than a plaque and a car park. Worth knowing before you build half a day around chasing them. That's a minor gripe against an otherwise solid stretch of touring, and it doesn't change my view that this is one of the more underrated pockets of SA for anyone doing the Big Lap or just a shorter loop out of Adelaide.

According to the South Australian History Hub, the copper mining boom through Burra and Kapunda in the 1840s and 50s was, for a period, the backbone of the colony's export economy — which is a fair bit of history for towns most people only know as a fuel stop. The Bureau of Meteorology's South Australian forecasts are worth checking before any Southern Flinders run, since conditions change quickly enough between the coast and the ranges to catch out anyone who hasn't looked.

Why we keep going back

Denise and I have now done this stretch three times, and each time we find another small town we'd skipped previously. That's the real appeal of the Mid North — it rewards slow travel rather than punishing it. There's no single knockout attraction that justifies the whole trip on its own, and if you're after that, you'll be disappointed. What you get instead is a string of honest little towns, decent free camps, good wine, and a gentle introduction to the ranges before they get properly serious further north. For us, that's plenty.

— Trev Sanders, Grey Nomad Correspondent