Peckish Travels

Bob and I enjoyed our wine tasting Monday afternoon at the Seppeltsfield Winery. It was a quiet day there, as we were the only visitors, so we were able to have a good chat with our pourer.

This morning we left Tanunda to drive back to the Adelaide airport to fly to Perth in Western Australia. We left Adelaide a little late, at about 12:30 p.m Adelaide time and arrived in Perth about 3:40 p.m. Perth time. Oddly, Perth is 1.5 hours behind Adelaide.

Perth is the capital and largest city of Western Australia with a population of 2.1 million. It is located along the Indian Ocean. For our Scottish friends, it was named after the city of Perth in Scotland, a town that Bob and I are not familiar with. It is the regional headquarters of several mining operations.

We have moved beyond the marathon and are back in Bob 60th birthday celebration mode. We are members of the Marriott hotel program, so have free hotel stays in the Westin Hotel in Perth while we are here, but Bob had requested (and we got) an upgrade to a suite. We are now feeling quite pampered and may end up having a relaxing stay in Perth by spending some time in the hotel .😀

After a pretty good post-marathon dinner last night and a night of sleep, we started our third day with a visit to the laundromat across the street from our hotel. We hadn’t washed clothes since our time in Janesville, Wisconsin. The laundromat was bright and clean, although no seats, and the cost was $4 Australian to wash and $6 Australian to dry (for 30 minutes).

After folding and storing the washed clothes, we decided to go out and about even though it was dreary out. First, we hit the Barossa Sculpture Park by an overlook. The fog/mist/dew didn’t allow for any view to speak of, but we got to check out a few sculptures, including a big head sculpture for Bob.

Next, Bob had found a cheese shop he was interested in, so we drove a short distance to the nearby town of Angaston. The cheese shop was nice to look around and Bob was going to do a cheese tasting but the place seemed to be staffed by only one employee who wasn’t able to get to all of the potential customers. Beth did a quick walk through town while Bob was in the shop.

Next, we drove a short distance to a chocolate shop, the Barossa Valley Chocolate Company, that also had a cafe and a cellar door.

Lastly, we returned to our hotel in Tanunda to explore the shopping district near our hotel. We started in a next door gallery and made a surprising discovery behind in the back of the building.

This afternoon we’ll be doing another wine tasting that we had scheduled online. This one will be at Seppeltsfield.

Yesterday, we left Adelaide by bussing to the airport to pick up a rental car which we drove up to Tanunda, one of the four main cities in the Barossa Valley wine region. Bob always gets a little anxious with driving on the left, but he picked it back up with no problem.

We were able to check into our hotel room early and just hung out after we picked up groceries at the local Foodland right across the street to give my legs a rest before the today’s marathon.

I have been stressing about the marathon, as the forecast was for rain and wind — two elements that I avoid in my training runs. Such is karma. The run started at 7:30am this morning, and as forecasted, it was windy, chilly, and rainy. I survived and finished second (out of only 9) in my age/gender category. Bob drove me to the start and met me at the end.

We had made wine tasting reservations online prior to our arrival for a 2:00 pm tasting at Jacob’s Creek, a brand we’re familiar with. It was a nice (not spectacular) facility and good wines with a friendly pourer. They had multiple tasting options for $10 Australian (approximately US$6.70), but if you visit the Barossa Valley and have limited time, there are probably more impressive cellar doors.

After the tasting, we stopped at Chateau Tanunda since they sponsored the marathon event. We wanted to at least see the grounds of the Barossa Valley’s first winery. Bob and I split a glass, the nice hostess poured it in two glasses for us and stoked up the fire.

We expected a rainy day today, and we got it, so we headed down North Terrace Street (where our hotel is also located) to visit some of Adelaide’s free indoor attractions. On our way, we saw a few statues of important individuals from South Australia as well as an impressive war memorial and Anzac Centenary Memorial Walk and Wall.

Our first stop was the State Library of South Australia. It was created in 1834 and their collections are focused on South Australiana, family history, and special collections. Parts of the library are under construction, but we still got to see a number of exhibits, including an interesting one on old menus.

From the State Library, we walked down the block to the Art Gallery of South Australia. The gallery has one of the largest art museum collections in Australia, comprising almost 47,000 works of art spanning 2,000 years. We thought it might be focused exclusively on South Australian artists, but that wasn’t the case.

Our final stop was at the Migration Museum. This museum provided a good overview of the evolution of migration to Australia as well as the changing national migration policies. It celebrates cultural diversity and the contributions of the different immigrants to Australia.

There are six federated states in Australia. Adelaide is the capital city and most populous city of the federated state of South Australia. With a population of almost 1.4 million, it is the 5th largest city in Australia. It is 654 km northwest of Melbourne, where we’ll be doing our housesit. As opposed to many other areas of Australia, which were originally populated by convicts expelled from England, Adelaide was a freely settled city.

There is an incredible Parks Land Hike/Bike Trail that circles the entire downtown area of Adelaide. I ran just a small part of it this morning and hope to run more tomorrow.

Bob and I had a good walkabout today to take advantage of the great weather (as in no rain, which is in the forecast for most of the next few days). We saw a lot and took way too many photos.

We began by walking down Hindley Street, a main shopping street, which ends with the pedestrian only Rundle Mall Street.

We checked out the National Wine Centre of Australia, which allowed us to learn more about the Barossa Valley wine region that we’ll be visiting this weekend as well as virtually explore some of the other 65 wine regions in Australia via a virtual reality headset. The wine centre was next to the beautiful Botanic Gardens that were free to explore.

We then walked along a trail by the River Torrens that runs through town. It is bordered by parts of the University of Adelaide as well as theaters, the convention center, a stadium/concert venue, and casino.

We have completed our long journey to Adelaide! We are currently 14.5 hours ahead of our friends and family in the Central Time Zone of the US.

A quick review of our travel. We flew Air Canada from Chicago to Vancouver and then Vancouver to Sydney. We were not terribly impressed with the airline. On the plus side, we left and arrived on schedule and the staff were friendly. However, they provided only barebones amenities for 2 international flights, and they left the lights up for the entirety of the flight to Sydney. Surprisingly, Bob and I slept the most that we have on any international flight in along time. We then switched to Virgin Atlantic for the flight from Sydney to Adelaide. Again, pretty basic but friendly service.

In terms of the airports, the Vancouver airport is designed to create feelings of calm, with lots of water features, artwork, a big aquarium with fish, etc. We were impressed. The Sydney airport, on the other hand, lacked good signage for the customs process and due to our domestic transfer, required us to pick up our luggage and then take a 15 minute bus transfer to the domestic terminal to check our bags onto the next flight. A process that would have made me crazy stressful if we hadn’t had such a long five hour layover.

The Adelaide airport was cute and bright. We were off quickly and our luggage was on the carousel by the time we got there to pick them up. We grabbed a bus into the city (about 20 minutes at 2ish this afternoon) and then had a short walk to our hotel.

After checking in and getting settled, we walked to the Adelaide Central Market that we had read about. We loved it. It’s a good mix of restaurants and vendors of various goods — produce, cheese, wine, ready to go salads, meats, bulk goods, flowers, etc.

We always love to find examples of the varied uses of the English language around the world. See below. In the US, this site would have been marked as a bus station.

Bob and I have had a lovely, relatively relaxing week or so since leaving North Carolina (if you don’t count a car fix for us and another for my mom). We visited a couple of new university towns and had good visits with my aunt in Chicago, my mom in Janesville, WI, and an uncle and aunt in Evansville, WI.

We left our car in Janesville and took the regional bus to O’Hare yesterday and then the metro to a nearby hotel so we wouldn’t have to worry about any bus issues this morning. After my last run for a few days, we had a relaxing morning at the hotel before we headed back to the airport via the free hotel shuttle.

We have walked most of the terminals and are now waiting to board to begin our 31 hour journey to Adelaide, Australia. We have a 4.5 flight to Vancouver, Canada, a 4.5 hour layover there, a 15.5 hour flight to Sydney, Australia, a 5 hour layover there, and then finally a 2 hour flight to Adelaide. Praying for some ability to sleep and lots of patience (prayers needed for both).

We are heading to Australia for a housesit in Melbourne, but prior to that, we will be traveling to see more of the country as part of an early celebration of Bob’s upcoming 60th birthday in August, and I’ll be running a marathon outside of Adelaide on 5/28 (fingers crossed).

Beth’s hometown is Janesville, Wisconsin, and we made it here about 3pm going with Plan B given our car troubles. The auto shop did call us earlier than we expected yesterday around 1pm. I went and got the car and we drove to West Lafayette, Indiana (Plan B), as there was a nice hotel on the University of Purdue campus.

The Union Hotel was really nice and feels a lot like The Graduate hotels. We explored it and the attached Purdue Memorial Union. The Union was quiet, as classes were done for the semester. We grabbed some snacks for dinner at a nearby Target and headed back to the room.

The hotel gave us a free upgrade, so before dinner in or room, we had a couple free Vesper Cocktails and a five-piece shrimp cocktail. The photos below are from last evening and this morning on my walkabout while Beth was running.

This morning after checking out, we drove to Beth’s aunt’s place in Chicago and had a great lunch and good visit before fighting with the Chicago traffic on our way to Janesville.

Yesterday we had about a 7 hour drive from just outside Asheville, North Carolina, to Bloomington, Indiana. We left early, as I wanted to run on Bloomington’s rail trail when we got in and then we planned to go out for dinner. Our drive started off with fog in the mountains, which was awesome to look at, but not as fun for driving through. After that though, we had a good drive through North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky.

Once we hit Indiana, we hit a reroute from GPS, then road detours, a stoppage for roadwork on some back country road that was down to one lane. Still, we were on track for about a 1:30 pm arrival. I think we even hit that, but we ended up arriving at an auto repair shop a couple blocks from the hotel (thank you Google Maps), as our charging indicator light had come on. The car manual seemed to indicate that meant that the battery was not being charged and to definitely not shut the car off. Luckily, we were just about 25 miles outside of Bloomington at this point.

We left the car at the shop. They said they would look at it and let us know. We walked with our bags the two blocks to the hotel and checked in. The good news is we had a lovely afternoon. I went for my run and was super impressed with the rail trail, which runs from the downtown area and then out in both directions. I ran from 2ish to 3ish on a Monday, and it was being well used at that time. Bob walked around the downtown area, which is quite compact and very close to Indiana University (where I was also accepted for graduate school but ended up choosing Texas instead).

The auto shop closed at 6. When we still hadn’t heard at 5:30, I called them. They were still busy but said they would call back. Bob got the call a little after 6, right as we were being seated for what turned out to be a great Indian dinner. They would have to fix the alternator, yada, yada, and it should be done by 4:00 pm tomorrow (now today). We were planning to leave this morning, but we have the time to play with, so Plan B it is. It’s not a cheap fix, but cars are worse than useless if they aren’t working, so we definitely want the fix.

Some photos of Bloomington. We stopped here to stay at The Graduate Hotel, an international chain of hotels that we are fond of. They tend to invoke the flavor of the local area and the local university in particular.

At about 6 pm on Sunday, May 14, our homeowner returned to the house in Boiling Springs. We had a great catch up with her and our helpful neighbor before heading off for a short hour plus drive down the road to get a head start on our Monday drive.

Sunday was the end of a lovely 4 month housesit, our longest to date. It was fun to vicariously see Italy, Paris, and Vienna on our homeowner’s travel and/or run adventures. She was so generous during our stay, and with a marathon completed in every US state, she’s an inspiration for my running.

We had a bonus friend on this housesit who lived just a couple of doors down and was always helpful even through a difficult time in her own family.

We loved exploring the area trails, sites, and meeting a number of locals, especially at the YMCA that we joined. It is a lovely area with gorgeous tree covered hills and mountains. It calls for further exploration sometime. We find that everywhere we go. We now know what we didn’t know.

The sweet, cheeky Cooper will remain in our hearts. He was such a good boy, but with just a bit of sass that kept us entertained. There is nothing happier than a dog doing a happy dance, and Cooper’s happiest dance was knowing he was getting to come with you in the car. Walks were nice but going in the car was better. (Of course, there was a sweet happy dance when he reunited with his person on Sunday as well.).

He also loves to be under a blanket. I think he’d be happy under one in the middle of the desert. And then when he starts to peak out he looks like this wise little Yoda creature who is about to impart some wisdom.

He enjoyed walks anywhere, but if we were in the neighborhood, the likelihood increased that he’d find something of such interest that he’d have to sit and watch. If you wanted to continue with the walk, you had to find a way to coax him back up or pick him up for a bit to move on.

I could go on about his speed in squirrel chasing in the backyard, his cuddling with me near dinner time (to make sure he got fed), his joy about bedtime, etc. Suffice to say we were honored to care for and get to know him. Cheers and best wishes to Linda, Cooper, and Marja! They have definitely written another chapter in our travel story.