Adelaide

I'm so glad that I deliberately planned to start work next month just so I could fit in a road trip to Adelaide with a bunch of friends. It turned out to be an incredible amount of fun. We talked, listened to music, bickered and snoozed in the car through the long drives and just generally cozied up to each other.

We drove overnight from Melbourne to Adelaide in an 8 seater Tarago so we all drove a couple of hours each then went straight to the German village of Hahndorf for a seriously meaty German lunch. That lunch.....lets just say that I literally gag at the thought of a bratwurst right now. I think that I ate enough smoked pork and sauerkraut to last me years. But we had fun wandering around the village and managed to fit in one wine tasting at the Bridgewater Mill before heading back to Adelaide city.

The second day was ALL ABOUT THE WINE. Sunny, beautiful and deliciously boozy Barossa Valley just begs to be explored and tried. Seriously, if you harbour any pretensions of being an oenophile, you must go there to try their wines. The cheese poem posted earlier was taken on that day, at a small village in the Barossa where we stopped to buy cheese for lunch. Funny how a simple lunch of fresh tomatoes, rye bread, ham and cheese can taste so good when eaten with friends sitting around a groundsheet in some out of the way park. It was just so gorgeously fresh and delicious.

The third day, we went camping in a national park. One of my friends, B, a camping virgin was totally wide eyed and shocked the entire drive into the national park. One of the guys had spent the entire trip telling her that she'd have to pee in the Margaret river and she was really afraid that there wouldn't be any proper toilets(there were). Her exclamations of joy and excitement when she saw the bathrooms were a riot. I've never seen anyone else get so worked up about seeing the toilet sign and I don't think I ever will again.

This was a sort of 'Goodbye beautiful Australia, I'll come back someday' trip for me. We passed the 12 Apostles on the way back and I waved to that long lovely stretch of coastline that I never tire of seeing. I don't think I'll forget it, the wildness of the bush and country, the cool stretches of blue sky, beach and sea and most of all, that sharp tang of eucalyptus.

I don't know if I'll get so immured in the dirt, sounds and smells of the city that I'll forget to come back. But I'll try to remember how good it was, how my heart lifts at the sight of open spaces...and how even city girls like me could wind up loving the country.