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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