Day 7: Australian Eats

Eve and I left the house after noon today since we had some business to conduct.  For starters, we booked a "Spaceship" for next week.  This is a van that has been decked out as a motor home with a bed in the back, a stove, a refrigerator and a dvd player.  We are pretty excited about it.  It will be our home for five days when we use it to drive to Alice Springs and Uluru (Ayers Rock) next week.  Eve also helped me sort out a cheap flight to Sydney in a few weeks.

Once we finally got our plans figured out, we headed back into the hills to visit Hanhdorf, Australia's oldest German town.  It turns out that the English were not the only ones to settle Australia, but Italian and German immigrants were also common, and formed their own communities once they arrived.  Hanhdorf is a cute, touristy town.  It reminds me of Freeport in Maine.  We lunched at Otto's Cafe on sausage rolls.  These are pastry surrounding sausage.  You can also get tomato sauce (ketchup) injected into your sausage roll, which I think it just about the greatest thing ever.  My determination is that sausage rolls are delicious!

To follow up the sausage roll, I bought a Lamington.  I'm told these are very Australian.  They are spongey vanilla cake covered in chocolate with coconut.  The one that I got was also jam filled, but that isn't a necessity.  Tomorrow is Australia Day, and apparently Lamingtons are essential for Australia Day celebrations.

From Hahndorf we headed to Cleeland Wildlife Park, but since we didn't arrive there until about 4pm, the staff advised that we return a different day to be able to enjoy all that they have on offer.  I plan to go back there later in the week.  We did see a little bit of the park, including this cute little creature, called a numbat who was in a cage with an open top so we could look down on him from above, and several creepy snakes.

Later in the day we headed to North Adelaide, Montefiore Hill, to get a view of the city. There is also a statue there of Colonel Light, who laid out the city of Adelaide.  In the statue he is pointing at the city and presumably explaining where he thinks things should go.  North Adelaide is a trendy section of town, and since the night was cool and fine for walking, we walked up and down the main street, and then settled on an A.B. for dinner.  This is gyro meat and french fries with a very tzatziki-like sauce on top of it all.  It doesn't look very nice, but as those of you who know how much I love tzatziki will imagine, I thought it was delicious.  It is debated what the initials A.B. stand for, but mostly the given references are pretty revolting so I will spare you them and just say that it was certainly tasty.