Sunday, 23 April, 2017

In the morning, we have a small snack, the bleu cheese finally finished, and get on the road to drive back to Victoria.

Once again I have to apologise as most of the photos I took this day did not work out / show up. [BTW: I have bought a new camera for the coming Europe trip so hopefully none of this will happen again]

Any way, we drive from our Airbnb to get over the Adelaide Hills and onto the Western Highway. Google Maps does a poor job sending us in various directions but not to the main highway and we go up into the Hills to Crafers etc. Eventually, we join the freeway and are rolling. Since Julie has departed, I am doing all of the driving which I found very hard work concentrating.

We stop at our favourite? place in Coonalpyn, where Jan and Hugh share a Jaffle, which is kind of a closed in waffle.

After a while we stop in Bordertown at a Roadhouse for lunch. I can’t recall what I have, not very good, and Jan and Hugh shared a chicken schnitzel roll which was by all accounts terrible. We drive into Victoria and stop at Great Western which is home to two very old wineries – Bests and Seppelts (remember that from the Barossa?)

We go into Bests and at least a few photos which are from a self guided tour we did in the cellar of this very old winery.

Note that it was now closed. We got there fairly late in the day because it was nearly 6 hours of driving. We still had the opportunity to go to Seppelts and tour the champagne drives, which were tunnels carved by miners in the 19th century, but it is decided we have had enough and we drive onto Ballarat where we will stay the night. We are in another Airbnb in a residential area of Ballarat. It is a nice older place well laid out and renovated. The owners had put out breakfast stuff for us and lots of figs from the garden, which are one of Julie’s favourites, too bad she is not here. We did not get to meet the owners but they were clearly very nice people.

We catch an Uber into the “big smoke”, downtown Ballarat. It actually is livelier than I remember when last I was here. Hugh has picked out another Brew Pub where we go in for a taste.

We agreed that we would have our dinner there, a poor choice in retrospect.

We exit, agreeing that that had been crap food. What with the awful stuff we had on the road in South Australia, this was easily the worst gourmet day of the American Invasion.

We catch an Uber back to the Airbnb. As I was quite tired from the driving during the day, which I am no longer used to, a quick crash out for me.

Saturday, 22 April, 2017

Today, we must leave the Barossa Valley and our Airbnb Mansion of the last 4 days. Julie goes to the local bakery and we have some thing to eat.

Before we totally leave the Barossa, our Airbnb Host had a small winery and suggested that we stopped by it on our way to Adelaide. So we find it “back in the woods” – it is called Moorooroo. The agreed pronunciation is “a cow and two kangas” – Moo-Roo_Roo.

A lot of my photos did not work out, disappeared somehow, so some text instead for a while. We drive out of the Barossa and eventually into Adelaide – the Capital and largest city of South Australia. We drive to the airport and drop off Julie – why? Because she is flying to Melbourne and then onto London for her second week course at Oxford University. So, it is goodbye Julie and we drive to our Airbnb for the night. It is to be in Glenelg which is a beachside suburb with lots of restaurants and bars. In fact, the place is a fair distance south of Glenelg in a housing area with not much else around. Disappointing.

One good thing is that there is a train line nearby. So after we unload everything, we walk to the train line and catch a train into Adelaide proper. Once we get there, we walk around the square that is the centre of Adelaide.

While walking around I have a tinge of sadness as one of our favourite restaurants from the past, Quiet Waters, had closed down. It was kind of a sleazy Lebanese but cheap and with good food. Any way, Hugh had found a brew pub so we walked around in circles for ages before we finally found it.

The bar tender was brought Hugh a paddle of four beers

The place was not too busy, they changed quickly, so the bartender took Jan and Hugh into the brewery part.

We then decide to go back towards Glenelg to get something to eat and crash out.

The Adelaide Casino is also based within the train station, off to the right. But we decided not to go in and caught the train back to Glenelg. Once again, none of my pictures turned out so a bit more text. It is about a 10 minute walk from the train station to a restaurant that we had picked out. It was Chinese and we had a decent meal. We caught a taxi, again no Uber, back to our apartment and crashed.