Adelaide

Pop quiz! How do you pronounce Melbourne? Wave goodbye along with us to this barely 24 turnaround in Melbourne and say "G'day" to much easier to pronounce and much easier to digest Adelaide!

We arrived at the Melbourne International Airport around 8am, so naturally we went to breakfast - after eating breakfast in New Zealand barely 4 hours earlier. We walked around and enjoyed the day, including a nice night in a boutique hotel that had a relaxation room outfit with 2 massage chairs! The next morning we got up early again, and headed a short walk over to the railway station. And yes, after taking too many long and expensive cab rides from our accommodations to airports and train stations, we were smart enough to purposefully book a hotel a 2 minute walk from the station. 

Being a bit of a train buff, I was very excited to travel on the famed Overland run by South Australian Railways. Imagine my extreme excitement to discover that the same morning we were set to travel to Adelaide, so too a vintage STEAM engine was setting out on a chartered tour! If you have never had the privilege and opportunity to witness a real steam engine chug-chugging it's way out of a station, well I can whole-heartedly recommend it. I was completely transfixed. Luckily Blake is the cameraman, so we got a picture!

Our journey to Adelaide was beautiful and calm. We watched the rolling hills and pastoral grazing fields roll by. The landscape changed relatively quickly into more hills and more trees! Real Trees! Speaking of plants, we had to visit the Adelaide Botanical Gardens. If you've kept up with the blog, you'll know that we have visited Botanical Gardens in nearly every city we have visited! They're all different, and all wonderful.

Adelaide's Botanical Gardens are known for their lily pad pool, which host a very large and rare variety of lily pad! They have cut one of the pads and flipped it over so you can see the incredible support structure of the veins underneath.

Another delightful surprise at the botanical gardens was a family of ducks! You can see here how the ducklings promptly sat down and cozied up to the warm pavement before mom and dad quacked them back to the work of foraging for good little grass bits.

The final surprise at the gardens was the presence of a CORPSE FLOWER! This is the largest flowering plant in the world! Although it's not technically a flower, it's some sort of pseudo-biological thing that looks enough like a flower that we can call it that when the real botanists aren't around. Why is it called corpse flower? Because it smells like hot, horrible death when it blooms. It also only blooms like once in 7-10 years, so it's pretty special to have one! Obviously it wasn't close to blooming, but we got to be near it. For those of you who have seen The Little Shop of Horrors, I sadly confirm that this plant did not even sing one little song. 

Adjacent to the botanical gardens is the National Wine Center, including the Wine Discovery Centre, which has all sorts of information and exhibits about the Australian wines! In particular, they have a tasting room where you can try little sips of many different wines! Look on Facebook or Instagram for pictures of us in the tasting room!

While we were walking back to our Airbnb, we came across a Unitarian Church! This is fun because I am Unitarian Universalist and it's awesome to find a congregation! It was closed, but now we know it's here.

What's that you say? Enough nonsense? More trains? You're prayers have been answered! Blake and I spent our next day visiting the National Railway Museum in Port Adelaide, just a 30 minute train ride north. Here I am in front of a very impressive engine. 

From Port Adelaide, we bussed about 20 minutes down the coast to Henley Beach, and walked from there to Glenelg Beach, about an hour and a half walk. We came across where the River Torrens runs into the ocean! It's not as impressive as you might imagine, which almost makes it more impressive. The river gently falls over a catch break and then sharply meanders down the beach to the ocean. It may look in the photo like it's simply the surf breaking in, but I assure you, that's the river!

From here, we will take a small detour down through the McLaren Vale, Adelaide Hills, Fleurieu Peninsula, Goolwa and Victor Harbor! There will certainly be more wine, plants, and train. Plus, a stop over into Hahndorf, the oldest German settlement in Australia!