Random thoughts and observations
Living in Adelaide it’s hard not to get caught up a little in the excitement of the Tour Down Under, which will be held from January 15-22, 2012.
The Tour Down Under was first held in 1999 and has grown year every year to become the biggest cycling race in the southern hemisphere.
The TDU is a festival of cycling, with a range of associated events that create a party atmosphere across South Australia.
Today we visited Gumeracha in the Adelaide Hills to see the biggest rocking horse in the world. Gumeracha is just 37km from Adelaide and is one of South Australia’s oldest settled areas, dating back to 1839. Today it has a population of 600 people and a toy factory with a big rocking horse. I don’t know what it is about Australian towns and why they feel that size matters, but I guess a big rocking horse is better than a big galah or pineapple.
We stopped briefly in Port Fairy on the way back from Warrnambool. It’s a bustling place on Sunday and really filled up around 11am as people flocked to the coffee shops and cafes. At the 2006 census, Port Fairy had a population of 2599. Its main industries are tourism and fishing, and it is the [...]
On the way back to Mount Gambier, I took the kids to Kryal Castle near Ballarat. It’s a replica medieval castle complete with moat, drawbridge, torture chamber, jousting field, wenches and jesters. I first went there when I was about 11 years old (see black and white photo below, me in the stocks with my [...]
We drove 550km from Mount Gambier to Moe today to spend the weekend before Christmas with my mother. We stopped just over an hour from Mount Gambier between Coleraine and Hamilton in Western Victoria to see the Wannon Falls. The falls were created by lava flows that surged upstream to the Wannon River. They feature [...]
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