Tuesday, April 22: Self-serve Breakfast; Robe House Outside; Coorong NP; Murray Bridge Cha Gio; Mt. Lofty Botanic Garden; Car Return; Check-in; Mayfair Hotel Surprises

We woke up precisely at 5 am. D slept well – jet lag apparently on the wane. I asked her to use Siri to locate a bfast place and she reminded me that the Robe House stay includes breakfast, the catch is that it is self-serve. We began opening doors to find fixins, D made toast, and we started in on the yogurt and muesli. I cracked open one of the 4 hard-boiled eggs only to discover that they were not, got out a frying pan and scrambled them.

We packed up – Dana remembering the refrigerated thermos (she’s getting quite good at that), closed the place and loaded the car. The morning weather was a little cloudy, but dry and clearing. I did a quick pic of the historic Robe House…

to remember it in its humble setting (we drove right by it without recognizing it on the way back from dinner last night).

There was a humble little church across the street that looked to be from the same era.

This was our last DIY day – driving from Robe to Adelaide and dropping off the car – our longest driving leg.

As the map shows, the first half of the trip hugs the coast, along the Coorong NP, most of which is long, shallow salt lagoons protected from the sea by sand dunes. “Coorong” is an anglicized version of the local indigenous word for “long, narrow neck” referring to the shape of the whole feature.

In the park did a scenic drive that started several miles up along its side. The lagoons had their unique appeal:

and I got some shots of these waterfowl that my Merlin app said were Australian shellducks…

and of this heron Merlin could not identify…

but the huge groups of other species (like pelicans) likely have already gone north for the winter.

There were a lot of smaller birds flitting about, and we had an early siting of some spectacular blue- green lorikeet-like birds that moved too quickly for me to capture images of them.

I need to interject that as I’m writing this I’m having trouble uploading the images, after having excellent wifi in all the little places where we’ve stayed to date. That is unfortunately consistent with my prior experiences of poor wifi in large, expensive hotels.

More driving, a lot of it on good roads at the peak legal speed of 110kph (~68mph). Around noon we stopped for some Vietnamese food in Murray Bridge, but because we wanted to visit the Mt. Lofty botanical garden before going into Adelaide, checking in and getting the car to Avis by 5 pm, we did no sightseeing there.

The Garden turned out to be huge, more of an arboretum really, and on a really steep hillside. I did get a few shots of things that caught my eye:

(I’ve loaded these plant images in the morning in the hotel business center. Despite a guy coming to the room last might they couldn’t fix the room wifi.)

An odd incident in the garden: a tweenage kid came up to me with a big smile and hugged me. Another older kid with him gently pulled him away, saying “no Robbie” (not sure that was his name, likely autistic?). I was shocked, but not afraid. I said, “Does that mean he likes me?” The older kid said, “Usually.” Felt pretty good.

At the garden it was quite a chore to go down and up the switchback trails (we started at the top entrance), and time was moving on, so we opted to leave and go on in to Adelaide. We soon got on an incredibly long, steep downhill stretch into Adelaide – which was fortunate because the gas gauge was near empty.

My Google Maps app led us directly to the Mayfair Hotel, which, to my surprise had a very unremarkable and for me inconvenient street presence, cramped on a busy corner with only a few loading spots on the street. We hurriedly jammed our stuff from the car into our bags and a bellhop helped D get them into the hotel, while I drove off to turn the car in.

That turned out to be one of the toughest tasks of the day, even though the hotel was only a block and a half from the Avis office. Due to the traffic routing I had to go around several blocks – all the while being fastidious to avoid a last minute mishap – and when I got to the Avis office I had go into a one way street that was no more than an alley, and park partly on a sidewalk while I ran in to ask the one clerk on duty what the hell to do with the car. He said to go through the alley, make two right turns and go down to a parking structure where Avis had some spots on the fourth floor.

I did all that and found the Avis spots, even though they were really on floor 4 1/2, and both the ramp up and the spots were really too narrow for newer cars, even smallish ones like the MG I was driving. I took the keys to the office and walked the block and 1/2 back to the Mayfair.

We relaxed in the room for awhile and around 5:30 went down for dinner in the hotel’s bistro, which offered another surprise. We were the only people in the place, but after we ordered the waitress came back to tell us they were out of that dish. D ordered a caesar sald I ordered fish. The waitress then came back and said they didn’t have the fish on the menu, so I said ok for the other one, neither of which I’d heard of before. It wasn’t great.

Then back to the room. D crashed early and I worked on the blog. It may be noticeable that I’ve upped the verbiage. I’ve decided that it’s just more fun to dwell on the observations and impressions a bit more now while they’re fresh in my mind, and likely to be more enjoyable to read in my dotage.