Lane's Ramblings

January 26 is Australia Day. Similar to the 4th of July in the US in that it is their national day and that it is celebrated on the actual day. This year the 26 fell on a Friday, which gave us a 3 day weekend and an excuse to get out of town for the weekend. I travel quite a bit and have since I moved to Australia but not only have I not been on a plane or boat or long distance train since November 3rd, I haven't even been out of the state of Victoria. To my credit, Victoria is huge.. but enough with the excuses, let's get out of Victoria and head to South Australia and its capital city, Adelaide.










I had a very well thought out plan for my Adelaide weekend: Adelaide is west so come Friday morning I will point my car west and eventually I will run into Adelaide. But then Adam and Melanie jumped on board for this trip and they wanted a little more planning. So we had to get a hotel before we got there. And we had to look at a map. And we had to have an idea of what we were going to do. But Adam was offering up his car and they were sharing the cost of gas and hotel so I let them in.

The big question everyone asks you in late January is, "So, what are you doing for Australia Day?" And my answer of, "Adelaide," was always returned with, "Why?" But sending the same question of what they were doing for Australia Day usually resulted in, "Nothing." So Adelaide gets a bad rap with Melbournians - probably because it's not Melbourne but few cities in this world are. But a guy I work with goes there often and he was able to give some places to go to.

What's the best thing to do the night before a road trip that starts at 6am the next day? Why, get some sleep and pack - but I didn't do either, I went to the pub and packed Friday morning. But I was able to get out of bed, into the car, and make it to the Docklands to meet Adam and Melanie by 6. We jumped in the car and we were on our way.

This is a roadtrip so we took the scenic route; past Ballarat, south of the Grampians, and stopped in Hamilton for breakfast at Subway (EVERYTHING was closed). From there we headed to Mt. Gambier, which was a nice little town with some good restaurants and a cool downtown. We weren't quite ready for lunch so we took a look at some sinkholes that they have in the area. These things were pretty big, one of them was made into a garden and the other was literally right across the street from the restaurant that we had lunch in. The reason that we were in Mt. Gambier was because on the second day that I was here I met this old English lady who was asking for directions (even though she's lived in Melbourne for 26 years) and when I told her that I just moved here she told me about a bunch of places to visit and one of them was Blue Lake in Mt. Gambier. This lake is quite grey in the winter but turns a brilliant blue in the summer. And they're not kidding this thing was blue - we were concerned about the color not showing up in the pictures but it does look pretty cool and I think seeing it in person is worth the long drive from Melbourne. Why is it blue you ask? Good question. We have one source - a postcard from the giftshop - that said that it's "a scientific mystery" and another - the sign outside of the giftshop - that said that all of the wavelengths except for blue are absorbed because of the temperature of the water - did I mention that this is a crater in a volcano? It is but you can't really tell - or at least I couldn't. And to finish of the tour of Mt. Gambier we had lunch at Sorento's, which was really good.




And we're off again rolling along and seeing absolutely nothing.. and I mean nothing. Well, maybe some sheep. And on and on it went until we pulled into Kingston and saw the biggest lobster ever - yeah it was fake but it was big. That was about 3 minutes of fun and then we were back on the road again and saw just nothing and nothing until we until we pulled into Adelaide around 7pm.






At this point I was driving in the city and, I tell you, these people can't drive, they just can't. They're horrible. We found the hotel (Stamford Hotel on North Terrace), checked in, it was very fancy, and out the door again to find some food and drink. We walked down Rundle St, which is the place for food in Adelaide and found the Exeter Hotel, which was recommended to us as a place to drink. And a place to drink it was but not so much to eat but they had steel tip darts so we had to stay for a few pints. Dinner ended up being pizza and then it was time to get some sleep.

Saturday. The first trick was getting around the city - I just wanted to do a quick loop of the city to get a feel for where everything is. of course, they had a free shuttle that took us around the city, the driver announced where everything was and when we stopped for a short time for the driver to have a cigarette we got out and talked to him and he told us some stories and pointed out som parts of town. We got off at the botanical gardens, walked through there, saw the rose garden and the Palm House. Now that we're walking we headed north past some parks and to a big church that you could see from our hotel room - but once you got up next to it it seemed so much less grand that we actually questioned whether or not that was the same church. But we were able to tour the inside, which was cool. Off again - past the oval and back to the center of town, we split up for a short time, and met up again for the art museum.

The art museum was good - the international stuff wasn't bad but I was very impressed with the Australian landscape paintings. I'm sure the landscape itself lent a bit of inspiration but these were very well done nonetheless. On some days I may even say that Adelaide's is better than Melbourne's - and free, all of the art museums in this country seem to be free to get into the main exhibition halls.

Walking all day so we now had to find some food and drink - back to Rundle St. What are we feeling? Mexican. of course there's not much for Mexican on Rundle St so a quick stop at the bookstore tells us to head up to Melbourne St to eat at Montezumas - not too bad, they had Dos Equis, good food. We walked through some rich neighbourhoods to get to O'Connell St. where we were supposed to find some more pubs but we really couldn't find any. We stopped at one that was pretty packed, took a table upstairs but that place was full of high school kids (the drinking age is 18) that came from the rich neighbourhoods that we had just walked through - kind of irritating. And that was Saturday night.

Sunday was just the long and boring ride home except for the giant koala that we ran into just north of the Grampians.





To recap, Adelaide is a nice city but if you're coming down here for a week or two don't feel too bad about skipping it. Picture link below:


http://www.kodakgallery.com/ShareLandingSignin.jsp?Uc=s8e95zp.c5bp03t9&Uy=fswkwq&Upost_signin=Slideshow.jsp%3Fmode%3Dfromshare&Ux=1&UV=253925476438_908126334109