Glenelg and Australia Day Weekend

As promised, I am starting a photo essay of Glenelg. It is a pretty large subject, so I will do it in installments. This is installment 1.

The first three pictures are from the Patawalonga, which is a water body and a park. My house is near the little park in the first photo, the second photo is of the park from a bridge over the Patawalonga (remember if you click on the photo, you'll get a full-sized image). The third is the a tide control structure and lock. After that the pictures are of a walk through Glenelg to the Esplanade, the water-front walk. All of the houses are on the Esplanade.

The lighted road is Jetty Road, the main business district of Glenelg (mostly cafes, bistros, restaurants, surf shops and gift shops, but banks, pharmacies, and produce shops as well). This is where I catch the tram to CBD every day; it is a 15 minute walk from my house. The kids are playing in a fountain at Mosley Square, the end of the tram line. The marina is on the Patawalonga, just below the tide structure and is for the little boats that are too small to fit in the lock. Of course I'll be bringing as many sunsets as possible...

I had a rather quiet Australia Day weekend except for Saturday I went with Dallas and Mary and a few of their friends to see a couple of races. The first race was the second to last leg of the Tour Down Under. The course went by the ocean at Port Noarlunga, where we found a good spot to watch as the cyclers came by three times... The first picture is the leaders, the rest is the pack. It was a better place to get photos than the Sunday before, but I didn't get any of Lance, he was well hidden in the middle of the pack (you can look for him, he might be there; I just can't find him...). Then we drove to a country fair at Wilunga to see the cow races. They also had a 'ute' show, milk chugging race, a couples race where the bloke chugs a beer while the sheila packs up the bed roll (hmmm, no pictures of that or the milk chug) and an engine blow...

Return to Adelaide

I returned to Adelaide on January 10th after being in PA since just before Thanksgiving. My flights were unremarkable other than the usual airline machinations (flight delayed so put on another airline, ended up running from one side of LAX to other....). Paul Howe picked me up at the airport in Adelaide and dropped me at the rental house in Glenelg.

It is pretty nice and close to the water so I have no complaints. I take the tram to work and into the CBD. It is a 15 minute walk from my house to the tram stop and the center of Glenelg (Jetty Road where the pictures of people jumping off the jetty below came from; I'll make Glenelg a photo essay later, it's worth being singled out). The tram takes about 20 minutes to get to the CBD. The weather has been pretty nice, mostly in the low 30's. We had one day of 42-degrees Celsius (roughly 115 Fahrenheit). I went with a coworker, Dan, and his wife, Dehlia, and their 2-year-old to the beach after work. It was actually quite nice (I had snow skied in PA only a week and a half before at about -10 degrees, so the difference in hemispheres was emphasized by the juxtaposition of the two extremes). There was a great sun set, but i didn't have my camera. However, the next day I got this picture of the sunset at Glenelg, I'll be on the look-out for more sunset photo ops...

I started on new project up in the Adelaide Hills (another name for the Mount Lofty Range). I went out to the job site and got some good pictures of directional drilling in the Aussie country side:

Saturday I took a bus tour up to the Barossa Valley. If you look at a bottle of Aussie wine, there is a good chance it is from this region (Jacobs Creek and Wolf Blass are two well know vintners from the region). We drove through the vineyards and stopped for wine tasting at Wolf Blass and Kaesler wineries. Very tasty! We then drove through the valley and back into the hills and ended at Hahndorf (an early German settlement, now quaint shopping district). The big hollow red gum tree (we passed on the way to Hahndorf) was the initial home of one of the original settlers to the area. He married a wife and had two children living in the hollow tree. Eventually they built a farm and had 16 children (only two in the tree). Their progeny still live in the farm house nearby (see http://www.southaustralianhistory.com.au/trees.htm). I'll mark all of these on the map so you can see where they are.

Hahndorf:

The weekend ended with a trip into Adelaide with my co-worker Dallas and his girlfriend Mary to see a bicycle race that is part of the Tour Down Under. The Cancer Council Classic was billed as Lance Armstrong's comeback race. He was indeed in the race (photos below, that's him with the black and yellow helmet), but it was a sprint not a mountain, so he was back in the pack... There are six stages to the tour starting Tuesday and ending in Adelaide next Sunday. He will get his chance to fully come back...

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