Rebecca’s Graduation in Adelaide

Sunday 24th September

We boarded the Albury – Adelaide, South Australia bus at Wangaratta at about 5:30am. This was the longest scheduled bus journey I’ve every been on up to this point. We have driven most of the route the bus took before, but this is the first time Rebecca and I had travelled together on such a long journey by public transport. You may ask why we would get the bus instead of drive a car. There were 2 main reasons:

• It was actually cheaper for bus tickets for the 3 of us than to pay for fuel (it was $2.20 per litre).
• As I don’t drive except around town, due to problems with my eyesight, Rebecca would have had to driven the whole way there and back, a distance of 800km one way. To break the journey overnight somewhere would have only added to the fuel costs and the length of time the journey took.

One of the disadvantages of travelling on public transport is that we couldn’t stop at any of the interesting sights along the way. But over all, the experience of using public transport to get to and from Adelaide was a good one.

After an approximately 12 hour bus journey, which included 3 meal breaks, we arrived in Adelaide, and walked the km or so from the central bus station to our accommodation. Our youngest progeny also went to Adelaide with us. This week’s visit to Adelaide was the third time all 3 of us had been there.

Monday 25th September

We spent our first day in Adelaide shopping for some new shoes for me and Eli and for other things in Rundle Mall, then spent a few hours exploring the nearby Botanic Gardens. A lot of Botanic Gardens have similarities, such as manicured grassed areas, various flower beds, and the like, so what interested me most about our visit to the Adelaide Botanic Gardens was the things that made this Botanic Gardens different to others I’ve visited. Starting with this fellow.

This is a bust of Carolus Linnaeus, recognised as “the father of systematic botany”. I know what “botany” is – the science of plant biology – but I’d never heard of “systematic botany” before, so I did a search on the internet for a definition. I didn’t find a specific definition, but found that “systematics” is the “study of the diversification of living forms, both past and present, and the relationships among living things through time” (Wikipedia), so Systematic Botany must be something like the “science of the diversification of plant biology, both past and present, and the relationships among plants through time”.

As the name “Botanic Gardens” suggests, there were a large variety of plants to be seen. Here’s some photos of plants I hadn’t encountered before. Some of these are positively scary!

Last time we visited Adelaide and spent time in Rundle Mall, we noticed various street art, such as the “Mall’s Balls”, and an elephant on stilts by Salvador Dali.

This time we saw more street art. I’m not sure whether they have been put there since our last visit, or whether we just didn’t see them. There was a huge metal pidgeon, and some bronze coloured pigs, as well as the statues of ‘humanised’ canines in one of the arcades that comes off the mall.

We also purchased some lunch, and other food to take back to accommodation for breakfasts during our stay. We seemed to spend a lot more time eating out on this visit to Adelaide than previous times, partially because the hotel room we were staying in didn’t have any means to cook any meals, not even a microwave oven. As a result, we got to sample many different types of food. Today, for lunch I had an “avo combo” sandwich from The Sandwich Hut in Rundle Mall for lunch. I would buy from them again, it was delicious! For our evening meal we, along one of Rebecca’s ‘study buddies’, chose the Cheeseburger Adelaide restaurant, a short walk from our accommodation. I had their only vegetarian burger and a box of french fries. All 4 of us really enjoyed our burgers and very yummy fries and agreed that eating there was a very good choice.

Tuesday 26th September

To start the day I went for an early morning 6km walk in the parkland to the west of the CBD along part of the Park Lands Trail. Adelaide is unique amongst Australia’s capital cities in that it’s CBD is completely surrounded by public parkland. The Park Lands Trail is about 18km long, it’s route going through the parkland that surrounds the CBD. The part of the trail I walked today was very popular, with runners, walkers, and cyclists, some of them obviously commuters on their way to work or school. Part of the trail goes through the West Terrace Cemetery.

After some breakfast, we did more shopping in Rundle Mall (this time it was some shoes for Rebecca for her graduation, and a flannelette shirt for our youngest progeny), then explored the South Australian Museum. Most modern museums in capital cities have various sections and temporary exhibitions. All the displays were interesting, but of all the sections in the museum, I found the “Pacific Gallery” and “Antarctic Exploration” sections the most interesting.

The Antarctic Exploration section had a bust of Sir Douglas Mawson OBE FRS FAA who lived from 5th May 1882 to 14 October 1958 and was an Australian geologist, Antarctic explorer, and academic. Along with Roald Amundsen, Robert Falcon Scott, and Sir Ernest Shackleton, he was a key expedition leader during the “Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration”. The Mawson Station, named after him, is one of three permanent bases and research outposts in Antarctica managed by the Australian Antarctic Division

In 1905 he was made a lecturer in petrology and mineralogy at the University of Adelaide. His first experience in the Antarctic was as a member of Ernest Shackleton’s Nimrod Expedition between 1907 and 1909. It was as part of that expedition’s northern party, that the South Magnetic Pole was reached and Mount Erebus was first climbed.

The Pacific Gallery, opened in 1895, is the oldest surviving gallery in the museum and with 3000 artifacts it is the largest display of Pacific cultures in Australia.

By the time we had finished at the museum it was about 12:30pm. So we went to find some lunch in one of the many food courts off the Rundle Mall. I got a Japanese Curry Don, which bore quite a resemblance to a curry I made a week or so ago at home – now I know what I can call that particular curry if I happen to make it again. After lunch Rebecca and me visited the MOD, a museum in the University of South Australia building near our accommodation. Dinner was Subway, which we had purchased earlier in the day.

Wednesday 27th September

Before breakfast, I went for a 10+kms walk along another part of the Park Lands Trail and part of the Torrens Linear Park. The Torrens Linear Park was completed in 1997 and was the first of its kind in Australia where it is the largest linear park that goes from hills to coast. It began as a flood mitigation scheme along the Torrens River running roughly west from the Adelaide Hills, through the Adelaide metropolitan area to the sea. The park has shared trails, often on both sides of the river, for use by cyclists and pedestrians, that run the 30km length of the park, from Gorge Road in Athelstone in the north-east, through the Northern Parklands of the City of Adelaide, to the river mouth at Henley Beach in the west. In the Parklands section, the river runs past many notable landmarks including the Adelaide Zoo, the Adelaide Botanic Gardens, the Festival Theatre and Elder Park. Further upstream the park is also host to part of Adelaide’s O-Bahn bus system.

Part way along the walk I felt the need to avail myself of a toilet. But every toilet I tried was either not yet opened for the day, closed for maintenance or cleaning, or someone had stuffed foreign objects into them rendering them useless. In the end, I decided to just keep walking and use the toilet in our accommodation.

We had lunch at Two Bit Villians restaurant in Rundle Mall – I had “The Foul Play” burger. On a previous visit to Adelaide, we were introduced to Two Bit Villians by two of Rebecca’s ‘study buddies’ who were graduating at that time. We were pretty impressed with it’s range of dishes, all of which were vegetarian or vegan.

At 3:30 Rebecca’s graduation started. There were speeches, presentations, and presenting of qualifications. Of course the most important part of the whole graduation ceremony was those few seconds between when Rebecca’s name was called and she proceeded across the stage to receive her award. On ya, Luv!

At 5:30pm, we went a Vietnamese restaurant not far from our accommodation, and I had a egg noodle dish with veggies which was very yummy. Adelaide certainly has a lot of variety of ethnic foods. The variety we ate were at various eateries all along Hindley St & Rundle Mall or arcades off Rundle Mall.

Thursday 28th September

Today we embarked on the reciprocal long distance bus trip back to Echuca. from there our oldest daughter, Zoe, picked us up for an overnight stay at her abode followed by her driving us home. The bus left Adelaide central bus station at about 8:30am, and we had meal stops at Pinnaroo, Nyah and Echuca. The vegetarian food options were sometimes very limited (think hot potato chips, maybe vegetarian pastries, or similar) at some of the various Roadhouses where the meal stops occurred in both directions.

More than once I decided to not bother with a meal because of the very limited vegetarian choice. By the end of the journey I was all “chipped-out” (ie, didn’t want any more potato chips).