Chapter 15 - Adelaide

Adelaide is a very pretty city known for its more than 1800 acres of parks that surround its center. It is also in the middle of several of Australia’s premier wine districts, two of which, Barossa Valley and McLaren Vale, we hope to visit.
In our research on Australia we found a great TV series, McLeod’s Daughters, set just outside the Barossa and we plan to visit that area too.

Our hotel is steps away from Adelaide Central Market which is similar to Detroit’s Eastern Market but at least tripled in size.

City architecture is very modern and colorful as you can tell by our hotel Indigo.

We are right around the corner from Chinatown as well which means it’s bustling with lots of good restaurants and pubs, Chinese and not.

Adelaide Day 1
On our first day in Adelaide, we took a trip to the Botanical gardens. When we were in the north, the plants were all tropical, blooming in a riot of colors, and everything looked

lush. Adelaide is subtropical which means we still see palm trees, but there is a definite hint of spring in the air. Deciduous trees are blooming and there are planted flowerbeds everywhere.
The gardens have beautiful rose gardens which are at their peak. The kitchen gardens were also full of inspiration.

There are also apparently attack magpies according to the signs which also outline strategies to avoid or combat them.

Central market may have started out as a farmers market, but it has added tiny restaurant stalls not much different than the hawker centers in Singapore. We had breakfast at the Big Table where we had yummy dishes like Green Eggs and Ham (pesto quiche) and waffles with fresh berries and ice cream.

A word about Australian food…
Like the U.S., Australia doesn’t have an identifiable cuisine. Kangaroo and croc are not on most menus and they’re certainly not exported. So there is a variety of cuisines to choose from in the cities and when you choose “Australian” you’re going to get a selection of steaks, burgers, “parmis” (chicken, veal, eggplant parmesan) and salad.
What does stand out is the bread. It’s all sourdough! Sourdough rye, sourdough ciabatta, olive sourdough, walnut and currant sourdough, even chocolate sourdough! Heaven! Different shops even share the pedigree of the starter—12 year, 4 year etc. so we have been able to have breakfast here without the stomach issues that can accompany regular

wheat breads.
And while Bill Bryson, author of a travel tome on Australia, may have complained that if the French explorers had gotten here a few days earlier than James Cook we’d all be eating French food, we can’t complain. The food here has been fabulous.
Oh, and even though Aussies are heading into summer, Christmas is still December 25. Since there is rarely snowfall anywhere in the country, a white Christmas is definitely not a thing here.

Adelaide Day 2

A little bit about McLeod’s Daughters: This TV show was actually filmed on locale in small towns on the edge of the Barossa Valley. It is like a typical western without the guns and

women playing most of the lead roles. We just loved it and saw all 224 episodes.
So the plan was…
We’d book a tour we found online that actually took you to the filming locations. Unfortunately that fell through because the main ranch which was a sheep farm at the time is now a luxury boutique hotel that rents for 1000 a night. So our back up plan was just to take a train to a nearby town and then a cab to the Gungellan hotel, which is where much of the series was filmed in and around. The largest nearby town was Gawler and since we were going to Gawler, we got off at Gawler! Wrong! We never noticed that there was a Gawler station and then a Gawler Central station. We got off the train, and there was no one around. No bus, no taxi, not even many people. We earned the sympathy of a young man tending a café who offered us a piece of honeycomb candy and a card with the number of a taxi service. The taxi driver took us to the Gungellan hotel advising us to call the same number to get a cab back.
We had a great lunch at the Gungellan hotel, which had memorabilia from McLeod’s Daughters all over the place. Then we crossed the street to the McLeod’s Daughters monument which had us in stitches. The original Drovers Run

ranch had an outdoor bathtub and windmill. And here they were! That was worth the effort right there. Plus we were right on the edge of the Barossa Valley.

So the plan was…
We’d call the taxi company and have a taxi ride to Nuriootpa, one of the prime wine villages in the valley.

Unfortunately contrary to what the original taxi driver told us, that company only served the Gawler area, not Nuriootpa. So we got yet another number to the Barossa Taxi and Light Cab

Service and we were on our way. We got dropped off at the Vine Inn, which had a huge mural of the Shiraz trail on the side of the building. All of the cellar doors were within walking distance so we set off for the first one, Elderton Winery just a ten minute walk up the street. We got there and stared. The vineyard may have been a ten minute walk, but it was huge! And it looked like the cellar door was waaaaaaay down the entrance drive. Well, Penfolds was next and it looked like the cellar door was not far off the road so we continued. Yay! There it was. But we were beginning to think walking distance really meant hiking distance and maybe the map was addressing backpackers and not 70-somethings!
Well the Penfolds tasting was wonderful and the sommelier threw in a really delicious port. Pity-port is what we suspect.

So the plan was to take a cab back to Gawler station and then the train back to Adelaide and that’s exactly what we did! On the way, the driver knew McLeod’s Daughters and told us he’d show us exactly where Drivers Run was. When we got there

he pointed to a vast expanse off the highway and said “There it is, They filmed the whole thing right there.” So we sort of have a picture.
Happily we had an uneventful trip back, had a wonderful dinner at the Italian restaurant, Parlamento, walked about a half mile to the hotel and slept like rocks!

Adelaide Day 3
We still hadn’t visited a working winery so the plan was to take a train to Seaford, have lunch there on the ocean, since that’s what expensive winery hopping tours say they do, and then

take a taxi to the Gemtree winery. But the reality was (are you detecting a pattern yet?) Seaford train station is nowhere near the ocean. At least not for walkers. So we found ourselves at a train station with a housing subdivision on one side and a shopping center on the other. We opted for the Big W shopping center where we called a taxi who didn’t exactly know where Gemtree was (we like the little wineries) but asked us to put Maps on narrate and between him and Siri we got there. The winery put up a sweet welcome message and the two ladies working there seemed flabbergasted that we came by cab.

This was a unique winery with excellent wines. They first let us taste the white wines and then took us down to see their bio-dynamics methods.

Biodynamics uses a planting calendar based on lunar and astrological influences. This guides when to plant, cultivate, prune and harvest the grapes.

The most interesting part involved putting cow poop into a cow‘s horn, burying it, and then digging it up after winter to find compost. We are not ones to judge the validity of this practice, but the Gemtree grapevines and gardens looked healthy and vigorous.

We went back up to the cellar door to taste the reds, which again were excellent. Then our tour guide, Katie, drove us through the vineyards to a park area they developed and we were served a picnic lunch. Wow! Great sashimi, artichokes, hummus, pickled turnips, sourdough bread and lamb. The owners rescued a pair of injured emus so we got to see them too. It was quite a unique winery tour!

The taxi driver had given us his number so we called him for the ride back to Seaford. On the way he detoured to show us the d’Arenberg cube, an artsy take on a cellar door or tasting room built by the d’Arenberg winery.

Once again we took the train back, this time stopping for pizza (sourdough of course!) on our walk from the station to the hotel.

A super end to our visit to Adelaide.

Great Aussie
Road Sign
#3

Why is Williamstown in parentheses?

Ghost town?

Afterthought?