It’s a rare grey, rainy day here in Yeppoon, so a good time to sit down and catch you up on life Down Under!
June 1st saw the beginning of winter in the southern hemisphere. This year we seem to have skipped autumn and gone straight from summer to winter. Our daytime highs are now 20-25C and overnight lows 10-15C – although I see on the forecast for later this week that we could be into the single digits overnight with highs around 17C – brrrr! It’s around 18C right now and I’m wearing a warm cardigan, the windows are closed, and the heat is on. It certainly didn’t take long to acclimatise to our subtropical climate!
I told you last blog that I would have an adventure to tell you about this month. On June 9th we were packing for our trip and out came some gear that rarely sees the light of day anymore:
This is because the forecast for our trip was:
It could have been worse, there was snow in the hills of New South Wales:
Glad we weren’t going there! Instead, we went to Adelaide, South Australia:
We LOVED Adelaide! Well, other than how cold it was. Also very dry. But just a terrific city. I was doing a talk at a conference there so we added some vacation days before and after. We stayed in the CBD (Aussie for downtown, stands for Central Business District) for the first 5 days then went out to Glenelg at the beach for the last 2 days. People in Melbourne and Sydney apparently make fun of Adelaide for being the “city of churches” but if I had to live in a city, I would choose Adelaide over Melbourne, Sydney, or Brisbane. All 4 are fabulous cities but what I liked about Adelaide is that it has all the conveniences of a big city but it’s not crowded and the traffic isn’t insane. The population is about a third of Sydney and Melbourne, so just 1.5 million, but it doesn’t even seem that big.
The city was settled in the mid 1800’s and they’ve done really well preserving many of the old buildings. And when they’ve built new buildings next to old buildings, they’ve made them blend together really nicely. Except for this one out at the beach where they put an eyesore in the middle of two gorgeous buildings:
Adelaide is also super easy to get around. The CBD is built on a grid, so you really can’t get lost. And there is a HUGE greenspace on all 4 borders. There is a tram that runs along the north border and down the centre and it’s free within the CBD. You can take it out to the beach, but from the edge of the CBD to the beach costs a whopping $4. Lots of fun art sculptures throughout the CBD:
Like most places we’ve been in Australia, Adelaide has done a lovely job with their war memorials:
The River Torrens meanders along the northern edge of the CBD and we walked A LONG WAY along it one day. It was so pretty:
It was neat seeing leaves on the ground – an autumn like in Canada!
We first walked from our hotel east to enjoy the botanic gardens:
Yes, more bats hanging in trees! And check out the size of the Amazonian lily pads in the photo above! I took piles of photos, too many for the blog, but here are some from the succulent and cactus area:
Hugh now wants a pond like the one in the photo above 🙂
We then walked west to see the old Adelaide Gaol. We very much misjudged how long a walk it was going to be, but most of it was along the river, so it was a really pretty walk. Click here to read about the Gaol – very interesting history.
Our friends Leigh and Darren had visited and had a strange paranormal experience. When we were there, I felt fine when we arrived and fine when we left, but while wandering around the gaol, I felt nauseous the whole time. Very strange.
Chris and Scott – this list of rules reminded us of Alcatraz:
One of the days when I was at the conference, Hugh took the free tram out to Haigh’s chocolate factory. Really delicious chocolate and when you read the history, you know why. The grandson joined the business in 1946 and felt like their quality wasn’t what it could be. He wrote to piles of chocolatiers in Europe to ask if he could apprentice with them. Most didn’t respond. Three did, but two of them said no. The one that said yes? Lindt! And the chocolate definitely has a Lindt style to it. I’m just enjoying a few of their chocolate-covered macadamia nuts with my tea right now 🙂
We pretty much ate our way through the city – it’s foodie heaven! We ate Mexican, Argentinian, Brazilian, Spanish, Algerian, and Greek. Many restaurants are open air, so a bit chilly while the frigid air was in town while we were there, but still enjoyed some margaritas and learned to use Tajin instead of salt to rim the glass:
The Argentinian restaurant, La Boca, was at our hotel and normally we don’t eat at hotel restaurants but it was a cold, rainy night and we didn’t feel like going far. So glad we went there! Amazing steaks and fabulous live Spanish music. We learned later that it was voted “Adelaide’s worst vegetarian restaurant” 🙂 Hugh spent time each day at the Central Market – reminded us of the central market in Valencia, just not quite as big (still huge though and brimming with gorgeous fresh foods).
And what else do we do when we’re in a city? We look for live blues! We totally lucked out in that this fabulous little place was a stone’s throw from our hotel:
Tiny spot in the basement of an historic building. Great blues ambience, very talented musician – and it was $10 cheeseburger and fries night and the cheeseburger was REALLY good! (fries, not so much)
Of course, the other major attraction to Adelaide is that it’s right close to Australia’s out-of-this-world wine regions, Barossa Valley and McLaren Vale. We had booked to do a McLaren Vale tour on our second day in Adelaide and then when our last day was looking cold and rainy, we booked to do another tour, this time in Barossa. Wow. Two amazing days of local boutique wine and food!
For the McLaren Vale tour, it was just us and one other couple – and they weren’t wine drinkers! They had taken the Ghan train tour down from Darwin (we’re going to have to do this one day) and the wine tour was included in their package. So, needless to say, we got extra special treatment at each of the wineries we went to. The 2nd winery we went to that day was Maxwell’s and it has become one of our new favourites. Luke looked after us really well – he abandoned the usual wine tasting menu once he knew what we liked and kept pouring fabulous red after fabulous red, he even opened a bottle he’s not supposed to for wine tastings, and he added in a few of their meads as well. OMG. Needless to say, we joined their wine club and had piles of bottles shipped back. One of my favourites is Maxwell’s Silver Hammer (how could you not name a Maxwell’s wine Silver Hammer :)) – a very well priced and delicious Shiraz. And what’s super fun is that Luke said if we can get 20 people together, he’ll fly up to Yeppoon to do a wine tasting for us! I said 20? Hold my beer, we can easily get double that! So we’re planning a big Maxwell’s wine tasting party for next May or June – hopefully celebrating us becoming permanent residents. A few days after we got back from Adelaide, our first shipment of Maxwell’s arrived:
Another McLaren Vale winery we went to wasn’t on the list of options for the tour, but we asked our guide if we could just stop quickly to take a photo of the sign and he agreed:
How could we not stop at Hugh Hamilton! So then the guide said, you really need to go sit on black sheep at the entrance to the winery, so we did as we were told:
And then we asked if it was OK if we just quickly ran in to buy a bottle of their Black Sheep line and our guide said no problem, so in we went.
Well. Despite not being on the tour and not paying for a tasting, when we explained why we liked the name of the winery, they just started pouring. (also they could probably tell I was hammered from the prior 3 wineries and it wouldn’t take much for the credit card to come out :)) Their wines were fabulous. And they had a deal, so we ordered some – how could you not when the deal included a toque (called a beanie here) that says Black Sheep Hugh Hamilton:
The Hugh Hamilton wines are a little more expensive, but we’ve become club members there too because they really are incredible. We had our favourite with friends last night and it really is delicious – Black Ops, a blend of shiraz and saperavi, apparently the only blend of that kind in the world.
We also stopped at The Cube in McLaren Vale:
It’s a winery and restaurant but also a permanent Salvadore Dali art exhibit. We didn’t go in (our guide says that since the last generation took over, they’re more into art than wine) but we enjoyed some of the sculptures on the property and inside one of the free galleries (the 4 legs do actually have a body attached, it’s just in the background being cleaned):
This chair looks like it belongs in Alice in Wonderland:
And these band sculptures are made out of rubber boots!
For our last winery of the day, we could choose where we wanted to go. I regret not choosing Mollydookers because I’d made a note of it some time ago and our friends Sarah and Matt introduced us to it last night and it’s fabulous. Instead we chose Wirra Wirra because it’s one we see regularly on restaurant menus. Unfortunately, the wines were pretty average. But the property was neat to visit:
They call the fence above “Wood Henge” – enormous fence posts! And yes, it’s not an optical illusion, the boat is built into the trees.
McLaren Vale is quite close to Adelaide, just 45 minutes south and quite close to the coast. Barossa is further away, about 1.5 hours north east of the city, so inland. Lovely views from the hills (somehow I don’t seem to have a good photo though). We joined another wine club, this time at Turkey Flat. In addition to their wines, they make an incredible sherry that has a buttery, caramel taste to it – yum! There were about 14 of us on this tour and we had a good laugh! The only photo I seem to have is this one:
This is taken on the Avenue of Palms – a 5km stretch where Seppelt winery workers planted 2,000 date palms in 1929, during the Great Depression. It unfortunately turned out that they weren’t the edible variety, but they certainly look beautiful!
On the Sunday morning, we headed to Glenelg, at the beach – nice view from our balcony:
And the view from the pier:
The Adelaide airport is right close by, so you get some great views of the planes coming in (not quite as spectacular as the airport beach in St Martin, but not bad!):
This is looking back to our hotel from a bit north of it:
You can see a fenced off area to the left. About two weeks or so before we arrived, a horrible wind storm hit the coast here and destroyed big sections of the sea wall and sidewalks so they’ve been busy repairing them.
This photo is for the coffee table book of funny signs I’ve seen around the world that I will one day (not) publish:
What I found funny is that the signs further up and down the beach on either side of this one did not include Bees as a hazard – so I guess the bees at Glenelg stay within the very narrow confines of this sign 🙂 Liz and Paul – if you ever get to Adelaide, you will of course need your photo taken with this sign!
We learned about “sand pumping” while here:
You can see the tractor above coming back after scraping a layer of sand off the beach – it dumps it, then the digger puts it into whatever that grey thing is called where it gets rid of any non-sand items, then the sand is mixed with seawater and pumped to the beaches that would otherwise erode. It’s apparently a common process on many ocean beaches. In Adelaide they do it in the winter because the beaches aren’t as busy.
Being on the east coast, we’re used to the sun rising over the ocean, but Glenelg faces west, so we got to watch the sun set over the ocean:
When we left to come home, the grey sky treated us to a double rainbow while we were at the airport:
OK, so that’s the trip to Adelaide covered – we will absolutely go back again! Probably spring or autumn. We were frozen while there in June and apparently it has many days over 40C in the summer, so I think spring or fall might be better 🙂
To make sure you get your Aussie creature fix, here is one of our St Andrew’s Cross spiders when he started making the cross in his web and when he finished. It’s so cool, like a zigzag stitch on a sewing machine:
And a sight you won’t see in many parts of the world, kangaroos lazing around golf bunkers:
A couple pied butcher birds having a bath (we almost never see them at the bath, they’re usually high up on rooftops and lamp posts):
Not an Aussie creature, but just letting you know that our fish in the front pond around the bird bath are doing well!
We still have 3 large orange ones, 1 large white one, and 2 babies. The babies were both black but one is now half black and half orange, so we call him Hallowe’en.
Also not Aussie, but seagulls hanging out with us at the yacht club last weekend:
Speaking of the yacht club, we got this great pic of Kevin and Jo’s cat, Vivacious, flying the spinnaker (I think it’s Sarah and Rod at the front and Rob at the back – Hugh and Kevin must’ve been busy drinking coffee :)):
Some enormous Aussie flora in our backyard:
The lemon tree in our front yard continues to produce piles of lemons, so Hugh is kept busy finding recipes that use lemons! He’s come up with an incredible lemon cheesecake:
And yesterday he made a lemon poppy seed loaf. We just need the damn lime tree to start producing to make margaritas and G&Ts!
Hugh was up early one morning and got this great sunrise photo from our front yard:
And then I got these amazing sunset photos on Thursday night:
June was always the best month for sunsets in Stoney Creek, Canada – maybe it is here too!
Music bingo has started up again! Here’s Leigh the shark taking on Hugh at pool:
The theme for this music bingo was Aussie Pub Songs. We thought we’d learned all the key Aussie songs of lore, but no, we were exposed to so many more this night! Including this one, which all Aussies are expected to sing to:
In very fun news, I finally got my beautiful new Tesla a few weeks ago! Her name is Daisy and I love her:
My T-shirt says Tesla Chicks Australia – a lovely gift from my friend Toni!
While we went up to Wreck Point to take photos of Daisy, a paraglider was gliding around right there in front of us! It was a very gusty, windy day, yet he had such finesse in controlling the sail, just incredible to watch. Hugh got this terrific photo (as my friend Pam commented in Facebook, it seems like it should be an ad for something!):
And then I got these videos:
I posted the videos in the Yeppon Community Facebook group, in case the glider was a member. He is! Turns out he has a broken leg right now, hence the very gentle landing you can see in the second video 🙂 Aussies are crazy. But they’re also very kind and personable. Before we went to Adelaide, Hugh and I were sitting having a sandwich at a picnic table along the boardwalk at the main beach. A bunch of kids were going back and forth on bikes and scooters. One of them, who looked to be maybe 13 years old, stopped to chat with us. He’d noticed the cafe name on the sandwich wrapper and so told us that his mate’s parents own the cafe. He chatted with us about the sandwiches he’d tried already and the ones he hasn’t yet tried, about how great the weather was, etc. He was such a terrific little conversationalist! It reminded me of back in March when Hugh and I had gotten up early to get a sunrise photo down at the lagoon and a couple teenage girls waiting for the pool to open politely struck up a conversation about the beautiful day and offered to take a photo of us with the sunrise. And then Geoff and Sharyn’s 17 year old daughter Alanah is so lovely to speak with. If all the teenagers we’ve met here are representative of Australian youth, the future really looks bright!
Happy Canada Day, everyone!