Saturday BBQ
Hello again,
Today we've been to Paul and Paula's house (the professors we are working with). It's up in the hills, i.e. about 19 km from the city. That would have been a long drive up the hills with our bikes. But the friend you learned of from the last post (Friday) took us with him by car. We only had to go to his place first.
Paul and Paula have a nice, remote house within a little valley that they share with a few others. We enjoyed a very nice lunch with them and talked a lot afterwards 🙂 Our mousse au chocolat seemed to be welcomed even though we'd been struggeling to make it the day before. It turns out you should never try to whip cream that's not cold enough as about nothing will happen 🙁
See you,
Johannes and Verena
Friday night
Hey everyone,
Friday night we were invited to a friend's house for a nice evening. He's living at Torrens Park about 8 km south of our place. It's been very funny and he and his fiance prepared little snacks for us as well as the others who were invited.
The only downside was the part of getting there. Of the 8 km about 4 km steadily go up a little with bigger inclines at the end. That's been really exhausting ... You kind of feel like being glued to the ground sometimes.
Anyway, it was nice, all together.
Cheers,
Johannes and Verena
Barossa and Adelaide Hills
And here what we have done on our second day with the rented car…
Today was Verena’s driving day. As she loves driving so much 😉 we started on a really nice and small serpentine road through the Adelaide Hills and along the river Torrens. We first stopped at a little car park at the Kangaroo Creek Reservoir to have a look at it. As we looked around we found our first Koala hanging around in the tree!
A Koala at the River Torrens
We then drove further to the Para Wirra Recreation Park. Just 2 minutes in there we had to stop because of 2 Emus walking across the street … We had a nice little walk to The Knob Lookout in that park before we headed to the Whispering Wall at the Barossa Reservoir. The wall is a 140 meters long dam, nothing special, but if one person says something on one end, the other person can hear it loud and clear on the other side.
Whispering Wall
From there we had a nice drive through the Barossa, the second very famous wine area around Adelaide. We had a look at lots of nice little villages/towns such as Gawler, Lyndoch or Tanunda. We spent a couple of minutes in the sculpture park at Mengler Hill (from there we had a really good view onto the Barossa). On our way back to Adelaide we drove through the Eden Valley and past the Herbig Family Tree, a nearly hollow tree which once was home for a whole family. We also stopped at the toy factory and their Big Rocking Horse in Gumeracha. The Big Rocking Horse is a “Schaukelpferd” which is nearly 13m high!
The Big Rocking Horse
After this we made our way through Hahndorf, the ‘German Village’, to the Mount Lofty Summit. From there you have a really good view over Adelaide and its suburbs. After sunset we spend a few more minutes up there to see Adelaide with its amazing lights by night. But it was only 7°C so that we were happy to get back in the car and drive home!
Adelaide from Mt Lofty
Cheers,
Verena & Johannes
McLaren Vale & Fleurieu Peninsula
Hello everyone,
This Sunday has been great. We rented a car for Sunday and Monday (which happens to be Labor Day this year 🙂 ) We got up very early to hit the road fast which we did at around 9 am.
First thing we did was Port Noarlunga where we wanted to see the coast with its cliffs. They are not very big, but very colorful. Sadly enough we had a cloudy morning.
The next stop was McLaren Vale which is a pretty famous wine region down here. Winegrowing is somewhat different here than at the Mosel. It's not done on the side of hills, but within the flat land. The way they do it is to tie the wine up making it look like little trees with two branches. Seems to work very well. We didn't do a whine tasting though. Got to stay sober for the road 🙁 We actually found the wineyard Verena went to last year though. Very nice place ...
From there we went down to Port Elliot. For some reason it's so much less kown than Victor Harbor, but it's more beautiful. It has a little, historic train station and a well-known bakery. We bought a bun, a pie and donuts, of course.
The very specialty came up at Port Elliot though. Well, rather at Basham Beach. We got to see 7 or 8 Southern Right Whales. Isn't that cool? We actually thought we wouldn't see any, because it's somewhat late in the season, but there they were. And not only were they there, about 4 of them were about 50m away from us, just off the shore! The others were pretty close too, but that may well have been some hundred meters. So just in case someone wants to watch whales own here, do not go to Victor Harbor ... go to Port Elliot and Basham Beach 😉
After about 3 hrs of whale watching it became more cloudy and we went through Victor Harbor right to Waitpinga Beach that's part of the Newland Head Conservation Park. As it wasn't exactly sunny and all that anymore we stayed only for a few moments and went back to Victor Harbor.
After having some pizza we went to Granite Island in the dark. You have to cross a long bridge (400 m or so) where a horse tram goes which kind of makes it interesting 🙂 On the small island there are living Little Penguins that really deserve the name as the reach about 35 cm in height. We managed to find one that was sitting in its tiny "cave". Pretty cute ...
Later we headed home directly as it was dark and still more than an hour to drive from Victor Harbor. We were tired, but happy. This has definitely been a great day!
Cheers, Johannes & Verena
And here a few pictures of the day...
3 Southern Right Whales
Tail fin of a Southern Right Whale
Verena and the Southern Right Whales
Moonlight from Granite Island
OzAsia Festival
Hello everyone,
Tonight we've been to the OzAsia Festival. It started out with the Moon Lantern Festival today as this is a big festival for Asian families. They had a parade of about 30 lanterns that were built by schools, companies and other organizations. That tiger was really great 🙂
The tiger lantern at the OzAsia Moon Lantern Festival 2009
Cheers and so long ... We'll be off to Victor Harbor and surroundings 🙂
Verena’s new hat
Hi again,
We went shopping today. It's really nice walking down the mall with its variety of shops. There are several underground shops as well. Pretty cool 🙂
And Verena got a little something for herself 🙂 Check out that great new hat Verena got ...
Verena's new hat
See ya, Johannes and Verena