o9 May 2011 - Adelaide Hills, South Australia

A warm welcome awaited us on arrival at the home of our friends at Five Bob Rd, Mt Barker - & yes, that is the name of the road.  Their property is 20 acres of fabulous red river gums & other natives, so we had the choice of several lovely campsites reasonably close to the house.  The birdlife is lovely too, & I spent lots of time trying to capture them with the camera, but oh so difficult. 
As these are some of the friends we cycled with in Victoria, naturally a ride  was on the immediate agenda (like next morning).  Fortunately it was a nice forest ride they had chosen especially with us in mind & we were able to reacquaint ourselves with some of the others from the group.  Thankfully it wasn't too long (27kms) though there were a couple of hills at the very end which I gave in to.  Stu of course made them all.   Being in one place for a while was the ideal opportunity to do a few little improvements to the van, so for the next day or two Mr Handyman was head down & 'you know' up & happy as a pig in mud.  Apart that is, from trying to source the bits & pieces he needed in a strange place.  Once that was all achieved we spent several days exploring the area.  The hills are indeed a lovely place to live - there are so many little villages or hamlets but I think my favourite is Hahndorf which was settled by German immigrants way back.  It definitely has a real german ambience & lovely food outlets with gorgeous sausages of all descriptions, plus amazing cheeses & the smell of the bakeries - yum!  Of course the hills is a big wine area too, so naturally we had to visit & sample the local wares.  We also attended a Jazz Festival one evening which was a real change for us.  It would not be complete without a visit to the city of Adelaide which is only about 45 minutes on the freeway.  It's quite a drop down from the hills to the city of lovely autumn trees, many parks & green areas & a proliferation of gorgeous stone houses & buildings, some historic but some modern & new.  Luckily we had our bikes to take a cycle round the river, about 10-15kms,  on a glorious warm sunny afternoon.
Next day we took a drive to Mt Barker itself to check out the view of the surrounding countryside.  On Sunday we did another bike ride of about 30 k ms around the local area & this time I managed all the hills, so I am definitely improving my fitness.  We were most surprised to see quite a bit of gorse growing in paddocks, the first we had witnessed in Australia,  though we do see odd bits of pampas here & there.  The weather hasn't been the best for us for our visit in this region, mostly fine with a bit of drizzle, but always cold, even down to zero one morning - very early for those temperatures they tell us???   The last couple of days we spent helping to split firewood with a huge petrol log splitter,  which was quite fun until I spotted a large huntsman spider crawling up my chest!  It got short shift but wasn't the last one we saw while working.  Anyway, we were well rewarded with dinner around a couple of lovely campfires the last two nights of our visit, a very fitting end to such a lovely stay.   Isn't it great to have lovely friends!