Back in Adelaide

Free at last! Yay - Sara and I left the vineyard this morning and made the trek back to Adelaide. We're spending two nights here before we part ways (sigh) - I head North East to Cairns and she heads West to Perth. We are looking forward to eating and drinking well and having some free time to ourselves.

To be perfectly honest, the vineyard was getting a bit old over the past few days. No need to go into details, this is about my adventures not my misadventures!

In any case, we did have some enjoyable experiences on the farm - namely when we left it to explore the area. The highlight by far was last Friday when we were given the day off (yah - but we worked 10 hours the next day doing cooking/catering).

We decided it was the opportune time to do our cycling tour of the McLaren Vale cellar doors. Cellar doors for those of you who are not familiar, are vineyards where you are invited to sample many, many wines grown locally.

For some reason I figured we would be able to handle six or seven. Sara just laughed at me and rightly so, because after our first stop I was in dire need of some bread to soak up the alcohol. It didn't help that it was 11 in the morning, I hadn't drank in two months and we had just finished a 10 km cycle! Anyways, we cycled on from Penny's Hills to Richard Hamilton/Leconfield Winery where we sampled some lovely wines then on to the town of McLaren Vale where we took a well deserved break from drinking and turned to almond sampling and lunch.

After lunch we hit up Hardy's, Beresford's and Hugh Hamilton's amaszing vineyard with 360 degree views of the area. By this time my ability to cycle 'may' have been slightly compromised. We headed back to Leconfield so I could pick up a bottle of Merlot then raced back to Penny's Hills so Sara could buy Almond Liquer (mmmm!).

Back in Willunga we decided a couple more drinks couldn't hurt us before we made the final leg of our journey home!

In total I think we cycled around 30 kilometres on our tour and drank at least 9 full glasses of wine. It was totally worth it...and it was absolutely free :)

Other highlights from our time on the farm include learning how to make pasta from scratch, making pizza crusts and doing a catering stint at one of the Fringe Festival shows in Adelaide. We also shovelled a lot of cow poo, which, it turns out, was surprisingly light and non-smelly. In fact, the shovel was much heavier than the poo so we all started picking it up with our hands (gloved!).

Well, time is wasting away and the sun is shining so will love you and leave you all for now.

Ooooohhhh - just a note - if you want to read more about our adventures or maybe see a pic or two, just click on the link to Sara's RTW Blog (see panel to your right)