Wanderung 26

Walkabout, Sailabout

March - May 2012


 

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Thursday, April 5th, 2012: From Adelaide to Tanunda, stopping at the National Motor Museum

Bob:

It was time for us to start moseying back across Australia to see our friends and ultimately meet our ship in Sydney. So we packed our things back in the car, checked out, and started following the tour in our Back Roads Australia guide that led from the Adelaide area North to the Flinders Ranges. The drive ended up deep in the mountains in the Outback, but that was way too far for the time we had available. Instead, we had booked a hotel in Tanunda for two nights and planned for the next day to drive as far North as possible and then back to our motel.

Since Tanunda is not that far from Adelaide, we could relax and take in the scenery during the drive out. In Birdsong, however, our guide mentioned a car museum and I thought that sounded interesting. So we stopped off there, but it turned out to be a much longer stop than we had expected!

The museum didn't open until 10:00 a.m., so we parked in their lot and ambled up and down the main street of Birdsong for a half an hour or so. Many of the old cottages looked very cozy and quaint, with their corrugated tin roofing, fancy ironwork, and rustic stone walls. The commercial buildings were more imposing, of course, but we were intrigued by one that had an old truck mounted out front as an advertising gimmick. That surely caught my attention, so I guess it was successful!

We turned around at the War Memorial (every town we stopped in seemed to have one), and retraced our steps to the museum just in time for its opening.

Monika:

It was time to move on. The car was full of gas and we had a place to stay for the night. So we started driving into the mountains. Our first stop was the National Motor Museum. It was in the small town of Birdsong and since we got there before it opened we walked around the little town to take pictures.

Bob:

The museum did not look that large from outside, but inside it contained 300 cars and 100 motorcycles, and a complete antique Shell filling station from the 1920s that had been carefully disassembled and then reassembled inside the main exhibit hall!

Monika:

The museum is housed behind an old flour mill in a very pretty setting. Now, I have mentioned how Bob likes museums and how he likes antique cars and motorcycles. There were three exhibition halls with cars, more cars, and motorcycles.

Bob:

I like new cars and motorcycles, but I like old cars even better, and old motorcycles the best of all, and there were of lot of those to examine! Almost all of the exhibited vehicles had a nice stainless-steel plaque with details about the vehicle right beside it, so I could immediately satisfy my curiosity about "what is it? what engine? how fast?" and things like that.

In some sense I was like a pig in clover. In another sense, however, some of the exhibited vehicles were slightly disturbing for me. It wasn't too bad that they had a 1959 Chevrolet Impala just like my foster parents had owned until I recalled that I had also owned a 1960 Chevrolet, two of them in fact, which made me feel a little old.

Monika:

I have mentioned how Bob likes museums and how he likes antique cars and motorcycles. Put these two together and what do you get?????? Three hours later I was ready for lunch. And yes, I did enjoy the museum (just maybe not three hours of it!). The number and variety of cars from turn of the century (the previous one) to present was astounding.

Or course, there were a lot of old cars. But even more astounding was seeing a couple of our earlier cars, like the 1960 Chevy and Helga's 1959 Beetle in which I had my first driving lessons. Ah, nostalgia.

Bob:

In the same vein, I found a Royal Enfield that was just like the Royal Enfield-Indian I bought in college, a BMW 650 that was just a couple years younger than my 1973 BMW R5/750 that I bought in Germany, and a Honda 90 that was the exact duplicate of the one I had briefly enjoyed commuting on whilst in graduate school. Seeing things I own or have owned in a museum takes me aback a bit, I guess, as it makes me wonder if I'm getting older too. I tend to resist that conclusion!

Of course, thinking about all that and just reading and processing the technical and historical information for 400 vehicles takes a LOT of time. I kept merrily working my way along through the old cars and motorcycles until, suddenly, three hours later when I came up for air, so to speak, and then noticed that Monika was getting both tired, hungry, and a little thin on patience with the whole business.

I tried to skip the more modern cars, but that was really difficult as they had things like the De Lorean stainless-steel bodied sports car, a solar-powered car, and a long, bullet-shaped motorcycle designed to set a land speed record. I mean, how can you just walk by things like that??? Still, I finally dragged myself back to the entrance and we went out to have some lunch in a cafe across the street.

Monika:

I had expected the myriads of cars in a motor museum, but not the hundreds of motorcycles. Wow, I had never seen that many old motorcycles in one place. No wonder Bob could not tear himself away. The most fun, however, I had with the placards that showed "Motorcycle Talk", pithy sayings of motorcyclists. Having lived with one, I really got a chuckle out of some of the sayings.


 

Bob:

Lunch made Monika feel considerably better and afterwards we continued our drive to Tanunda and signed in at our motel. There were still a couple of hours of sunlight left in the day, so we decided to take the Barossa Valley loop driving tour to get a feel for the area. The Barossa Valley turned out to be in some sense similar to the Mc Laren Vale in that it is a valley mostly dedicated to wine vineyards. However, the drive showed us that the Barossa Valley was quite a bit larger than the Mc Laren Vale, and the exact grapes grown also seemed to be a bit different as the vineyards produced Rieslings as well as the Shiraz wines that were the specialty of the Mc Laren Vale.

Monika:

And finally there was an old car for people to sit in. So Bob sat and dreamed about what it would have been driving a car like this in the old days. But that was it. It was definitely time for lunch.

After lunch we drove on to Tanunda where our hotel was located. This is deep in the wine region of the Barossa Valley and we could see vineyards everywhere. After we had checked into the motel appropriately named Weintal (a German word meaning "wine valley"), we decided to do one of the scenic drives through the area.

One area was particularly fascinating to me. The area around Tanunda had originally been settled by Germans, and we were guided onto a road called Seppeltsfield Road. Well, that sounded German enough; but I was surprised when after a few miles we came to the Seppeltsfield winery which was still housed in the original buildings and seemed well taken care of. Unfortunately, the place was closed by now and the only days they did not give tours was Christmas and Good Friday. Guess what day was tomorrow - no, not Christmas, but the other one!

Bob:

The map for the driving tour mentioned a sculpture garden at a photographic scenic spot, and although it was not signed at the road we did manage to find the right parking lot and scenic overlook. It turned out that there had been two sessions of stone carvers working on blocks of stone for the sculpture garden, one in 1998 and one in 2008, and the results of those sculpture symposia littered the landscape, but in an artistic way, of course!

Since each sculpturing symposium had produced about 8 works by 8 different artists, there were a total of about 16 sculptures there ranging from modernistic "this is a block of uncarved stone" sculptures to the highly carved and polished figures that looked like they had been made from huge blocks of marble (Think Michelangelo's 'Pieta'). Predictably, I tended to favor the sculptures that looked like something rather than the "rock" or even the "rock on top of a rock" modernistic sculptures, since their connection to everyday perception was rather tenuous. Still, they all were fun pieces and it reminded me of the results of another sculpturing symposium that we had seen at Broken Hill during our first trip to Australia (Wanderung 20).

Fully satisfied, we returned to our motel shortly before sundown and had a quiet evening with our books, puzzles, and computer before turning in for the night.

Monika:

Of particular interest to me was a sculpture garden that was mentioned on the map. We found the sculpture garden on top of a hill at a lookout. It reminded me of the sculpture garden we had seen in Broken Hill. Here too, slabs of stone had been put there and eight stone carving artists from different countries told to do their thing. Here they actually had done it twice, so there were 16 sculptures we could admire, play around in, and photograph. All this came on top of a nice view over miles of vineyards.

We finally returned to our room, had our evening meal of noodles and turned in.


 



Copyright 2012 by R. W. Holt and E. M. Holt


 

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