We stayed in the Adelaide Caravan park at Adelaide. Who would have thought there would be a caravan park so close to a capital city. It was a 5 minute walk to a free bus and if you’re feeling energetic it is a 20 minute walk to the Rundle Street Mall. The Torrens River (more of a creek at this point) was just behind us and had paths running all along it. I was most impressed with Adelaide is seemed well set out and user friendly. The buildings are cool and there’s lots of old stone houses and churches and things like that. It makes me feel a bit sad about how Brisbane has treated it’s history.

There are more characters to be introduced in this episode, but they need a bit of a backstory. When we were at Waratah in Tasmania we got chatting to a nice family in a camper trailer that were staying there at the same time. There is Angela and Peter and their young minion Fin. Fin is the type of guy who picks up friends like  a sheep does burrs. The kids enjoyed hanging out with him. While we were at Waratah we ran into them at Cradle Mountain (and maybe I saw Pete in the pub and he looked like he needed some company).  Turns out they are also on a long term travel odyssey and live on the Sunshine Coast. Then, when we were on the Spirit of Tasmania on our way back to the mainland; who do reckon we saw on deck 9 where the kids video games were? We had dinner that night and swapped facebook numbers because we knew they were headed to Adelaide around this time. So they have been staying here too and it has made our Adelaide stop over so much more pleasant. The kids have loved having Fin around to play in the pool or throw a frisbee or a footy around. And Pete and Ange have been great company for us adults. We even had a great excuse to stretch the budget out to a pub dinner. They made our stay there much more enjoyable.

We did a day trip to a town in the Adelaide hills called Hahndorf. It was originally settled by a large group of German immigrants from the 1860’s. So the theme is uber Deutsch. There are sooo many delicious cake shops and wurst houses and old stone buildings and German flags and autumnal trees with their red orange yellow falling leaves. It was a bit like Mt Tambourine in south east Queensland but dial up the quaintness factor and the German factor by 108.09 %. We finished the day by visiting the Beerenberg farm and picked our own strawberries. Too good … the yummiest strawberries.

We spent some of our time in the city looking around. We went to the gallery dahhling and did our self portraits (they’re probably up on the wall as you read this), we went Rundle Street Mall and we went to the central markets.

The markets were exciting as Monja and I both watched the Poh show on television that showed how she set up her café (Jamface) at the markets. So we were very keen to go and see it in the flesh (she wasn’t there her fleshy self unfortunately). We had a great coffee and cake there. The only problem was, it was a bit squeezy, so I had to crawl under the table to get out. The Adelaide markets are just full of amazing, reasonably priced wide ranging foodstuffs. I could live there for at least a month and not eat the same thing twice, and then stay another month to do it again.  Adelaidens are lucky to have such a fantastic place to buy amazing produce.

We had a spherical ball in Adelaide and only wished we had more time there. But the South Australian school holidays defeated us and the park could only give us four nights so now we are in Gawler -the gateway to the Barossa. I am looking up Maggie Beer’s address as soon as I get this posted.

This post was brought to you by the free wifi s at Adelaide caravan park and Gawler gaetway caravan park, which is very unusual for wifi to work this well.