SA Day 1: Hobart to Hahndorf

As is traditional for Tasmanians headed to the mainland for a long weekend, we woke up early to make it to the airport in time for the 6 am flight.  (Note for non-Tasmanians: arriving at Hobart ‘International’ Airport half an hour early for a flight is more than enough time!)  And as is also usual for Tasmanians, the gent seated next to us on the flight to Melbourne recognised us; he was one of the cyclist friends of the bloke who’d come off his bike near our car at Shoobridge Bend.

It’s a short flight to Melbourne, we had a short transfer in Melbourne, and it’s a short flight from there to Adelaide, so even with the 1/2 hour time difference we were in Adelaide by 9 am local time.  We only had one checked bag, which was the 3rd to appear on the baggage carousel.  The car rental counter was just a few steps away, so I soon had the info about our reservation out, then we went to the office outside to pick up the keys.  We were on the road and free to go where our fancy took us by 9:10!

And where did our fancy take us?  Firstly to the cache Flat Pack, which was in the car park of – yes, you guessed it – Ikea.  After finding the cache we proceeded inside for breakfast.  And then we went through Ikea.  Scott and I enjoyed ourselves.  There were so many brilliant things we couldn’t possibly get on our flight home.  So we were restrained, however this stop also set the theme for the purchases we would make on the trip:  it became the Illumination Tour.  I got a lamp, and Scott got a candelabra – and some vases.

Then we hit the food section.  My mum had commented on some  Swedish chocolates I posted a photo of on Flickr (Lye Yee and Clayton gave them to us), so I picked up a couple boxes of those for them.  And a couple more for Scott and I.  We also got some Daim chocolates and Annas Pepparkakor.  Warning: both are HIGHLY addictive.

Our Ikea needs taken care of for the moment, we headed off to Adelaide Central Market so I could grab my first ever webcam cache!  I loved the markets.  I love seeing gorgeous looking fruit, hundreds of different cheeses, stacks of different loaves.  We’re not the sort of people to do a huge shop at a large chain grocery store once a week.  We usually get what we need for dinner on the way home from work, and I prefer to stop at smaller shops.  When I lived in Paris, I loved going to the market street in my university’s neighbourhood; I don’t see anything wrong with stopping at a different place for the different types of groceries you need if it’s conveniently located.  This market was just my sort of place!

I had my misgivings about logging the webcam cache.  Online it switches between several different webcams in the market.  I had watched it for a little while once to try to get some landmarks I could recognise, so I found one of these and stood there while logging onto the internet using my netbook.  My timing was stunning; the webcam being broadcast when I went to the website just happened to be the one I was standing in view of!  I quickly grabbed the image – hooray!

We weren’t ready for lunch, so we headed off for a walk outside to explore / cache.  It had been raining when we landed, but the sky was now sporting some blue.  We walked from cache to cache, and of course I spent the walk juggling my camera and GPSr and wishing I had more sets of eyes to watch the arrow, read the descriptions, and check out buildings.

I’ve been through South Australia before but not into Adelaide.  When my father and Tante Sandra came to Australia in 1997, we came through SA between visiting Uluru and the Grampians.  But our trip was more about seeing the bush than cities (especially as we were camping), so we avoided Adelaide.  (And Melbourne, and Brisbane. . .)  So it was interesting to see Adelaide – and especially as now I see it through ‘Tasmanian’ eyes.  The architecture is definitely Australian, however with local differences.  In Hobart our older buildings are pretty much all sandstone.  Adelaide has its share of them, but buildings seemed to be more commonly made of non-sandstone stone walls with heavy grouting and with bricks surrounding the windows and ‘framing’ the walls.

We found a few caches and wandered in the sunshine, getting wet bottoms when sitting on benches to log caches as it was hard to remember that a short time before it had been pouring with rain!  One of the spots we visited was Light Square, named after Colonel William Light.

Colonel Light was one of Adelaide’s founding fathers and deserves at the very least a mention here.  Adelaide is a planned city, with the site on the Torrens River and layout by Light.  Adelaide has a grid design interspaced by wide boulevards and many public squares.  It is then entirely encircled by parkland, which survives to this day (unlike in other planned cities).  It really makes for a fetching and easily navigated city.    Just when you’re getting tired of walking through blocks of city, there’s a square or park with some green and usually some interesting sculpures to divert you.  And, well, a geocache.

We worked our way back towards the markets and wandered through a sort of Asian section adjacent to it to the west.  I was looking for a certain type of Vietnamese lunch that I haven’t found in Tasmania, however we passed a Japanese lunch restaurant that looked too appealing to pass on, so we had udon soups for lunch.

Lunch finished, we had to get another cache at the markets.  I didn’t think we’d find it as it had a few DNFs and it wasn’t in a spot with great reception but find it we did!  However while we did this it started to pour down with rain again.

Scott really wanted to visit the Adelaide Botanic Gardens at some point during the trip.  We debated going to them now in spite of the rain, but in the end decided against it.  We would be back in town on Saturday and have part of Sunday before heading home; if one of those days had better weather it would be nice.  And it’s doubtful it could rain harder than it was at this point!

So the new plan was to cache our way towards Hahndorf, where I’d booked accommodation for the night.  We did a few, had some adventures knowing exactly where we were and where we wanted to go – but not always which lane to be in!  Eventually the early wake-up was beginning to tell, so when the cache Crazy Urban Caching turned out to be located right outside a cafe, we went inside for a coffee stop.  They were understaffed, however the coffee was good and it was warm and dry inside.  A nice break.

Caching our way towards Hahndorf also involved picking up a few puzzles I’d solved while planning the trip.  Gadding in Glenside was the first of these, which is rather appropriate as I think it was the first of the puzzles I solved.  We did a few other caches in the neighbourhoods along the way, then decided to do the short walk to WTF: Muggle Deception Techniques.  The weather was behaving when we parked the car, so we decided to risk it and leave the Gortex behind.  So of course just as we arrived at GZ it absolutely bucketed down with rain!  However it wasn’t too cold, we were on holiday, and we could see the humour in the situation so we headed back to the car in a cheery, if wet, mood.  I could even muster up a big grin for the cyclist who said ‘Nice weather for it’ as he zipped past.

We continued on to GZ of the puzzle cache Gridlock.  It didn’t seem the idea hide to me; difficult to park near and up a crumbly embankment.  But having solved the puzzle I certainly wasn’t going to give it a miss when I was that close to it!

We continued on Hahndorf-wise.  When planning the trip I’d thought hitting the cache Lofty Peaks #1 would be a good idea as it’s a drive-by on top of a mountain so hopefully would have a nice view.  We went up despite the pouring rain and were rewarded with views of the inside of clouds.  But we also found another cache and had a short, moist walk in the bush.

Onward to Hahndorf!  We arrived and the plan was to find our motel before heading out to look at the town.  The motel was nowhere near where it had been shown on maps, and as practically no buildings had numbers on them we drove through town without finding it.  Back  into town we went, parked in the middle hoping the tourist info place could help, but then realised the motel was behind some of the buildings on main street – right there in the middle.  We checked in, then headed out for a walk around town in the dusk.  With shops closing and no other destination  in mind but to wander, I of course thought some caching was in order.  First we went to a multi which my awake-at-4:30am mind just couldn’t take (sorry, but multis that seem to make you do obscure maths for no real reason annoy me), then we went to a traditional that we DNFed.  But I was happy enough wandering up and down the town.  It was rather lovely in a ‘rainy but lovely yellow autumn leaves’ kind of way.

On the way back to the motel we visited a bottle shop and got some very nice ‘Bird in Hand * Two in the Bush’ Merlot Cabernet, Mt Lofty Ranges.  It was dark but a bit early for dinner, so I had a shower then we watched Grand Designs while having a glass of the red.  Very nice drop.

We’d already checked out menus during our earlier walk, so we headed off to the German Arms Hotel.  We hadn’t realised Thursday is their $10 schnitzel night, so it was rather busy.  However we had nowhere else to be, and it was warm and faintly sauerkraut-smelling.  We shared Rindsrouladen (German style aged beef, rolled and filled with wood smoked bacon, mustard, gherkin, onion, matured cheese, poached in Cooper’s Stout & served on a bed of sauerkraut accompanied by rhine potatoes) and Chicken Krakau (chicken breast filled with smoked cheese, polish wurst, wrapped in smokey bacon & capped with a rich cream sauce made from the juices of the pan).  I took photos but won’t include them; German food isn’t the most visually appetising!

And so ended Day 1 of our trip to South Australia.  Of course on the way back to the motel I tried taking a few night photos; none of them were terribly good but at least I amused myself.