Sunday, Oct 23 - To the Clare Valley

We’re leaving Adelaide this morning after a too short stay, but we have a lot of ground to cover. We walked down to our “Eat in Italy” breakfast cafe, but they were closed. We passed some girls dancing down the street in skin-tight micro minis who obviously had never gone to bed! This town rocks! Too bad I go to bed at ten!

We packed and went down to the fancy Sebel bar at 9 for an a la carte breakfast as the buffet costs $38 each and who can eat that much food?! We ordered cappuccinos and scrambled eggs on toast with bacon and watched as beer after beer was ordered and served!

We walked a couple of blocks to Europcar and filled out the paperwork for a Subaru Forrester, and were told we’d been upgraded…to a Mitsubishi Pajero, an enormous SUV with rhino bars and a spare on the back and one on the top! Bob managed to maneuver it out of the tiny lot and onto the street. We turned left onto N. Terrace and left into the Sebel’s parking garage and immediately the spare on top crashed into the hanging sign by the entry way. We crept into the garage, banging on a few rafters! What a monster!

We brought down our bags and checked out and slowly slithered out of the garage and onto N terrace and left onto King William St, heading north. Bob figured traffic would be light on Sunday morning, but he was wrong! Everyone was up and about, not wanting to miss a minute of their weekend. We drove through lovely N. Adelaide and into the surrounding suburbs. The A1 highway is lined with auto dealers and small industrial plants and was pretty unattractive for the first 20 miles. The highway split into three routes without any warning and we found ourselves hurtling away from the A1 into a big traffic jam around a large flea market, cars parked every which way. We managed to turn around eventually, couldn’t get on the A1 from that direction and did another u-turn and finally escaped!

The countryside became bucolic and more attractive. We found the turnoff to St. Kilda and headed west to the shore where there are salt flats and a protected remnant of the original mangrove vegetation. We parked by a small marina and entered the St Kilda Mangrove Boardwalk which turned out to be a great place to bird, very peaceful and scenic. We walked about a mile seeing various Fairy Wrens, Singing Honeycreeper, and White-browed Scrub-Wren. As we drove away we saw many Banded Stilts, a lovely red-legged black and white bird, and also a new life bird!. We also passed a bizarre trolley running along the marsh edge - maybe a remnant of some past era of beach resort fame? (Superb Fairy Wren & Banded Stilt)

We continued northeast on back roads through acres of wheat fields bordered with bits of the native mallee forest (small multi-trunked eucalyptus) and tiny towns. Gradually we turned eastward into some rolling foothills and started seeing vineyards and sheep with baby lambs. At about four we reached the town of Clare and the Clare Valley Motel, a very trim motel on a hill overlooking a eucalyptus forest across the way.

We settled in and then took a drive around the area. We stopped at the nearby The Last Word Café for a dinner reservation and continued south along the valley past about one hundred wineries and turned around in the town of Auburn (pop. 334), a typical tiny village of stone cottages with metal roofs and porch coverings. We took a back road to Mintaro (pop, 80, est. 1884) an exquisite village of English gardens and a wonderful-looking pub. This town is the source of slate for billiards tables the world over!

We saw our first Galahs (pink and grey parrots) of the trip and a flock of Little Corellas (white parrots) followed our car at 35MPH for a while.

We returned to the motel, cleaned up and drove the short ways to The Last Word which turned out to be mainly a lunch spot as we were almost the only customers! We sat on the porch, listening to frogs croak in the tiny pond next to our feet and had delicious mugs of parsnip-potato soup and started on a bottle of the café‘s own wine: Last Word Wines LaRRikin Semillon-Sauvignon Blanc 2010. Then the owner bizarrely turned on a TV projector onto an enormous screen across the parking lot! Fortunately it was tuned to an amusing kids’ cooking contest. We then ate very good chicken stuffed with feta on a mountain of mash (mashed potatoes) with red pepper sauce. Somehow the TV got onto an awful program about hideous crimes which was pretty un-appetizing, but by that time we were too full for dessert anyway. Home to crash.