Adelaide Zoo - one for the kids!

We took Ella to Adelaide Zoo on our last afternoon in the city, and it was fun. Overall I'd say Bristol Zoo is better, partly because it houses its animals better. The monkey enclosure in Adelaide was GREAT: large, airy, open and with big old trees for the monkeys to swing around in, but the sea lion enclosure was 16 years old and tiny, and the poor old sea lion inside it wasn't too happy...

Anyway, here is a short carnival of some of the animals we saw:





A beakful of pelicans




















A preened green peacock
















A cuddly calf














A fluff of fowl












A quirky qwokka














A trunked tapir

The Monday Heron

Last Monday we had a visitor to our front garden: an elegant heron, who picked his way across the grass in a very dainty fashion. Unfortunately the picture is a little blurry because I had to use the telephoto facility which isn't the best feature of our little digital camera, but he is very dignified, nonetheless!

McLaren Vale misery!

We've just come back from a four-night trip to South Australia, and I'm feeling very pleased with myself. It's Michael's birthday next week, and he usually does lovely things for my birthday and I am often lacking in inspiration when it comes to him, but this year I had some ideas and booked this trip while Michael was away in Europe. It's been tricky to conceal the details from him, but he honestly didn't know where he was going until we were on the way to the airport on Tuesday morning. Hooray!

Our itinerary was two nights in a lovely cottage in the middle of a vineyard in McLaren Vale, home of some GREAT wines and only about 40 kms from Adelaide, then two nights in a studio apartment in the city itself.





This was the unbearable view from the back patio, out over the vineyards to the limestone hills beyond...







I'm not sure how we coped with the beauty of it all! The landlady was very pleasant, we found everything we needed in the village just down the road, and we had a very relaxing time. A highlight was lunch at the d'Arenberg restaurant nearby - d'Arenberg wines have been a favourite ever since we sampled our first bottle of Dead Arm shiraz, and it was delightful to sit on their terrace after a strenuous half-hour of tasting, to savour a slap-up three-course lunch. I was the designated driver for the day, and so Michael was able to have a couple of great glasses of red wine with his meal.

We visited Hahndorf, founded by German colonists and home to Sir Hans Heysen, a famous Australian painter


We were loath to leave McLaren Vale and very nearly cancelled our trip to Adelaide in order to stay an extra two days in the peace of the vineyards, but in the end we decided to continue as planned. Hahndorf was quaint but too full of craft shops for Michael's liking! I enjoyed the chance to snap up some decent presents and cards for people, since Coffs Harbour doesn't really do that sort of things very well.


Hahndorf's main street is planted with deciduous trees - unusual for Australia


Next stop Adelaide, and the apartment I'd chosen was pretty awful: basically a grotty hotel room with two beds and a small bathroom, and not even a view out of the window (which looked into a concrete light well). I was very disappointed, but we made the best of it. Amazing how you can cook egg and beans on toast with only a microwave and two tea cups!

The only thing that was good about the apartment was its location, at one end of the main run of resturants and cafes, and very close to China Town and the fabulous central food market: 250 mouth-watering stalls. And our mouths were watering: at least a dozen great cheese stalls, a similar number of specialist butchers, fragrant bakeries with freshly made croissants and baklava, exotic florists, delicatessens... oh that Coffs Harbour had even one of each type, but sadly it doesn't. We have heard that 5 - 10 years ago Coffs Harbour was great for foodies, but it's changed over the years - we're just hoping that future expansion plans mean that its gastronomic star starts to rise again.




One thing Adelaide does have is early cottages and historic buildings, often decorated with traditional 'lacework' iron mongery









These workers cottages are near Haigh's Chocolate Factory - very quaint!

One thing I did manage to do while we were in Adelaide is to go shopping, taking advantage of the fact that although the city is probably smaller than Coffs Harbour, it has all the facilities of a state capital, including a big branch of David Jones, which sells Michael's favourite tea in the food hall, and which also had a proper childrens' shoe department. I find it amazing that I can't get decent, fitted, shoes for Ella in Coffs Harbour. It's madening and frustrating to have to get on a plane in order to get her a pair of shoes! But we succeeded and she's now the proud owner of a pair of (pink - it hardly needs saying) Mary Jane shoes by OshKosh.

These pigs are in the central shopping street! They've got names, but I can't remember what they are...


We finished our trip with a visit to Haigh's Chocolate Factory - where sadly we couldn't get on factory tour - and the zoo (see next post!), and then flew home.

Social whirl!

We've had our most social week in Australia so far, I think, and it's been fun and exhausting in equal measure.

On Sunday Willis and his partner Shannon and son Van came round for dinner and we didn't get to bed until about 1am. Van had fallen asleep on the sofa, and I think Shannon was tired and would have liked to go to bed at about 10:30 but Willis was on a conversational roll and they didn't leave until 12:30am...

On Wednesday we had Jake and Ann Madden and their four children over for an afternoon/evening drink that lasted several hours. They have bought a block of land just over a ridge from Lot 31 North Boambee Road, the entrance to which will be a few hundred metres before ours. They've got a driveway now but haven't started building yet and I imagine both families will be moving in at about the same time, in the first months of next year. As you can imagine, we wanted to meet them because they will be close neighbours and we would all like to have a thriving community out there. We liked them, and the drinks went well. They'll have lots of sporty things like a basket ball hoop, somewhere to ride a bike and stuff, and we'll have a pool, so I have a little day dream about all the children being able to wander between our house and their house, playing together. We'll see what happens! But it's definitely nice to feel that we have the opportunity to get to know people who will be living near to us - for me it makes the idea of living 1.4 kilometres up a dirt track a potentially less isolating experience.

On Thursday Gary and Nimmi visited us en route to Sydney and stayed for lunch. It was slightly strange seeing them over here, but fun! Our first Bristol friends to be able to visit. They were both on good form and we had a very pleasant lunch out on the verandah.

On Friday I went to Gallery 37's latest exhibition opening night with Willis, and then Sammy and Duncan came over for dinner and we didn't get to bed until 1am again. The house diagonally across from us at the back had a loud party, but it actually finished before 11pm, I think, so it didn't disturb us too much although you could hear every word of the music from inside our place with the doors shut.

Yesterday we had I left Michael in bed in the morning and went out shopping with Ella, and as we drove back to Malibu Drive Julie Jones and her daughter Emily were just pulling out of the road, clearly having just been in to see if we were home, so they turned round, followed us in and stayed for a cuppa and a chat. Emily and Ella don't play that brilliantly together, but they managed better this time and we had a good afternoon. Then at 5:30 Clinton and Tracie, from over the road, came round for a drink and stayed until 9:30pm. We've chatted to them for six months when passing each other in our cars or collecting the post at the end of our drive, but this was our first social engagement and it was fun too. But by the end I was dead on my feet, and I cheated and fed Ella fish fingers before putting her to bed. All we wanted to do was to go to bed as well, but the house at the back had started party #2 with louder, thumpier music and there wasn't much chance of sleep... We gave them until 11:30pm, having both gone downstairs to do some work, but in the end I had enough and phoned the police. Three quarters of an hour later the music stopped in its tracks and we were able to go to bed. Thank you to the helpful man who answered the phone at the police station!

Unfortunately for us, Ella woke us at 02:30 complaining of itchy insect bites, and then woke us again at 08:10 this morning by getting up and turning the TV on loud... We could both have done with some more sleep but clearly it wasn't to be, so in the end we got up. And at 11:00 we met Sammie, Duncan and their son Thomas at the beach/barbeque at Korora Reserve and had baked beans, sausages, eggs, fried onions and mushrooms for brunch. Very civilised! I do like it there: it's not crowded, the facilities are good (free electric barbeques, covered benches, a tap, bins and a good children's play area, plus the beach next door) and it's very nice eating your breakfast roll in the open air with sunshine and the parrots flying around.

Neither Michael nor I has managed to do much work over the last few days: we've been too busy socialising, or recovering from the ensuing lack of sleep (no, we haven't over-indulged on the alcohol front!), and now we've got to get our heads down because we're off for a few days from Tuesday. I'd better get back to work!

Easter hat parade!

Great expectations

Ooh, you might need to click on the picture and see it close up to appreciate it! This is the preliminary plan for our house on Lot 31 North Boambee Road. I emphasise the word preliminary here because I am absolutely sure things will change a lot, but we had great fun this morning at Christian Fisher's practice, looking at drawings and playing around with ideas. I'm sure you realise it, but just in case, the image shows three views of the same property: the top view is an impression of what the construction will look like against the green of the hillside. The middle view is a floor-plan, and the bottom view is the front elevation.

The basic 'vision' for the property, as you can see, is for the various functions to be more or less separated out into different building units. So the central building houses the main living/kitchen/dining areas plus bedrooms for Ella and for us. Then there are two other buildings to contain guests, in one, and working spaces for Michael and me in the other. I guess that in an older building they would have been in separate 'wings'! Which makes it all sound very posh...

We have budget constraints and need to be clever in the use of materials to get a look and feel that we can afford without crippling ourselves financially. Christian's idea is to make the long sweep of walls at the rear of the buildings out of local Valla stone, partly to 'anchor' the building and to provide a heat sink on the northern elevation that will absorb warmth from the sun and radiate that back through the house in the winter months while shielding rooms from the brunt of the heat in summer. The south-facing rooms take full advantage of the ocean view and their southern walls are made of lighter materials, because here you don't need sturdy masonry to protect against the cold in the same way that you do in the UK. The exterior cladding of the building is likely to be something called zincalum which is a corrugated metal, interspersed with shiplap timber to give some variation. As the building is so long, it's likely that we'll run the corrugations vertically to reduce the perceived length of the buildings.

'Service areas' like the laundry and bathrooms will run along the rear of the building so that all rooms can make the most of the views, and areas will be separated by deck areas and courtyards. In this climate you want to maximise your opportunities to sit outside and enjoy the warmth and sunshine!

A roof sloping towards the rear of the property will provide lots of run-off rainwater which is important when you think that we will be wholly dependent on rainwater for all water useage: showers, baths, toilets, laundry and drinking water. No backup town supplies here! Which means no horrible chlorination, either.

We've built in lots of money-saving options too. Things like grey-water recycling (so that waste water from showers, for example, could be used to flush the toilet) cost something to put in but save money in the long-run, and solar heating and electricity mean we won't have electricity bills to pay after installation. But there are other things too: if we can't afford fancy windows we can put plain ones in (louvres are fashionable - and practical - here but cost more); we could build the pool later if we can't afford it up front, and we can cut other costs or defer things until a few years down the road. I imagine that although it will be very cost-effective to do garden landscaping at the same time as the house area is cleared we won't be able to do much more than put in a vegetable patch for quite some time... Luckily we won't need to buy any furniture (although we will need to buy appliances and all the stuff to fit-out bathrooms and kitchens... help).

So there you go: the plans for The Fernery, version #1.