Adelaide

Friday 20th March 2009

After two days travelling we finally pull into Adelaide. When we arrive at the hostel I realise I was lucky to have booked up some accommodation before I left Perth. They have a massive weekend ahead, the Fringe Festival & the Clipsol 500 Car Racing is in town. For a place that doesn't have a reputation for a lively city its awash with people. The Fringe Festival certainly keeps us entertained for a few evenings with its mad selection of shows. The picture below is from what was known as The Freaky Animal Show...you just couldn't even imagine some of the stuff there. As for the Clipsol 500 its draws its own crowd of people, petrol heads from all over Australia. The noise from the cars can be heard all over the city as they race around the track. After two days of sitting on a train and almost 4-months of not doing any exercise I decide one evening to go out for a run, I'm feeling adventurous! About 10mins into it I realise how unfit I have got, my legs are getting stiff & my chest is starting to get tight...never thought running would actually be this hard. I manage to get out for almost an hour, plenty of stops in between, and fair enough it did get a little easier but I was seriously tired at the end of it. On my final day in Adelaide I decide to do a little wine tasting. Some of the areas in this region for its vineyards so myself and a dutch guy(Jasper) who I met on the train from Perth decide to take a day out and do some wine sampling...its fee, which I think was the big seller! Its only in the first winery I find out that Jasper is a chef and has done several courses on wine tasting, as for me well I know the difference between Red & White so I give him a few tips of my own! It turns out to be a great day, well how could it not, travelling around the countryside sampling wine not bad eh. The plan after Adelaide was to make my way to Melbourne via The Great Ocean Road and luckily enough there are a couple of people who have transport that are looking for others to share the journey expenses. It turns out there are 7 of us in total travelling in two cars, 3 Irish(Myself, Chris & Ryana), 1-Dutch(Jasper), 1-English(Ollie), 1-French(Elise) & 1-German(Hubertus)...its a bit of a mix! Luckily enough the guys who owe the cars have tents & all the cooking facilities you could need, its a great setup. We set off on convoy early Monday morning and plan to travel as far as we can so the last two days we can spend time checking out the main sights but we have a slight hick-up on route. Some how ;-) Ryana manages to let her van run out of fuel but we were lucky in that we were only 10k from a station. On the second day of the trip we finally make it onto the Ocean road and at last we get a chance to see some of the sights.