Wed-Fri, Oct 19-21 Flying to OZ!

We transported Miss Maddie to the Cat House Hotel and settled her into her regular Junior Suite. Then we finished packing and watering, ate up the leftovers for dinner and drove down to LAX in a rental car, getting there in a very swift 1 ½ hours. Our Qantas flight wasn’t scheduled to leave until 11:20 PM from Terminal 4 so we had a bit of a wait, but were finally herded onto the 747 and, thanks to selecting seats from seatguru.com (a great site!), settled into 72A & B with lots of room around our seats. The last six rows have two seats on the side rather than three - much nicer! The movie & TV selection were amazing- I watched “Red Dog“ a good Aussie film -, the dinner not bad and we both got about 6-7 hours of sleep, before descending into partly cloudy Brisbane. We took the bus to the domestic terminal and had four more hours to wait until our flight to Adelaide.

We boarded the 737 for Adelaide which turned out to be brand spanking new as we were the second ever batch of passengers to ride her. We had TVs built-in to the seats in front of us and a lovely new interior except that the seats seemed even closer together than usual. The array of movie entertainment helped ease the pain in our joints somewhat! 

We arrived in Adelaide at 2:30 PM to a pleasant partly cloudy 70 degrees and admired the very snazzy new airport - much nicer than Brisbane. We took a taxi downtown though very green suburbs. Adelaide was not settled by convicts, as the natives will tell you, and it is a thoroughly planned city with a figure eight of parkland wrapping around Adelaide to the south and North Adelaide to the north. We arrived at the Sebel Hotel, on the north edge of Adelaide and got a very nice room with a view of the interior courtyard and no traffic noise. We cleaned up and re-organized our gear before setting out at 5:30.

We entered the elevator with an extremely voluptuous young woman dressed in a skin-tight very skimpy dress. She was very chatty and pleasant, but we felt rather drab and ancient in comparison! The lobby bar was rocking and the streets were quite full of Friday night happy-hour revelers. We walked through the Rundle Street Mall, a pedestrian area of boutiques, department stores, and cafes. The trees were full of roosting, squawking parakeets, but we had no binoculars on us to ID them! Probably Rainbow Lorikeets. The buildings were either ornate late nineteenth century British or very modern. We walked through this lively scene and settled on an Italian restaurant, Parlamento, across from the Parliament Building and had a very good dinner. I had penne with pumpkin, spinach and pine nuts and Bob had a chicken breast with a delicious polenta-thickened sauce . We drank a bottle of local Barossa Bethany Cabernet-Merlot and split a dish of affogato - vanilla gelato with a cup of espresso poured on top. There is an international ecological conference in town and the waiter wondered if Bob was Al Gore’s assistant! Back to the Sebel and bed!