Like everyone else the last couple of years have been a bit ‘hit and miss’ for holidays. While some have ventured overseas, we’d decided to leave that until next year. You may recall in 2020 we did some travelling around southern Queensland, mainly because we weren’t allowed to go interstate. It proved to be an enjoyable experience getting to know our own backyard, even if I did make some brave statements about never-ending droughts that have proven to be completely incorrect.
Anyway, onto 2022. We’ve had a couple of trips to Melbourne over the last twelve months, after not being able to see family down here during the ‘Lockdown Years’. Each time we come to visit, we get a new variant of whichever cold is going around and this visit was no exception. So after almost dying from this latest cold and successfully passing it on to Debbie, I spent 3 days this week at Cyber Con 2022. It was very interesting (to me) and was quite tiring reconnecting with people I hadn’t seen for a long time. The plan was always to kick off the holiday straight after that.
We’d decided that we wanted to be a bit different this year and attempt some domestic train travel. We’ve not done any long distance trains and the best option for this trip was to take ‘The Overland’ from Melbourne to Adelaide. The instructions were to be at Southern Cross station by 7 AM and typically we were a little early. The ‘Check-In’ process involved standing in a queue to receive a hand-written card with your seat number, which was then checked by the same person who wrote the card. Only then were you were allowed to take your seat.
We paid a bit extra to get food and non-alcoholic drinks included and a bit more legroom. It was nice not to be crammed in like in an aeroplane, but it takes a lot longer – a full day commitment is required. The food was serviceable but some of it lacked a bit of the flavour / spice that we would normally like, but there was enough of it, so we didn’t go hungry.
On Friday, there had been a considerable rain storm in Victoria that had caused some localised flooding and meant that the train had to travel more slowly at times. I have driven this route many times, but I don’t recall ever seeing it as green and as wet as it was today. The canola fields adding splashes of bright yellow made the trip quite spectacular at times. It looks like there’ll be no shortage of canola oil this year!
The final hour of the trip from Murray Bridge that traverses the Adelaide Hills was a great experience. The Adelaide Hills is an amazing part of the world that is currently looking stunning in the spring time.
We’ve settled into our AirBnB apartment that will be home for the next two nights. There’ll be lots more photo’s tomorrow as we have a quick trip to McLaren Vale. I relied on Deb’s photo’s out the train window today, as I don’t really rate my ‘moving train’ photo skills.
Until Tomorrow!
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