Day 5 Thursday 8th Feb

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07:00am
Not much in the news here in Oz at the mo.... Terry Butcher (ex england captain) has been sacked as manager of Sydney soccer club. And staying with soccer, Oz lost to Denmark... but the amateur team beat an Asian team 11:0.....
Lots of environmental concerns in the news... much like at home....

Had a text from a friend back home who said it was gonna snow back home: 'Its supposed to be 2-3 inches of snow by morning so think of me when ur on the beach'
Well... here in Adelaide its gonna be a mild 27'c... I just hope we still have that breeze today.....

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9:00am
we got up early today.. And trundled to beehive corner, to our favourite breaky point so far. todays agenda is quite simple.
breakfast
shopping
taxi 2 penfolds winery near adelaide hills, east of the city
2hr tour of winery including wine tasting and sampling local tapas produce
pour self back into taxi
arrange car hire for friday and saturday
quite an easy day....
In the papers today, kylies split and exhibition makes front page news.
Australia must reduce its reliance on oil and considet imposing vehicle congestion charges in major cities.
a cyclone which has been threatening the north queensland coast is expected to dissipate..... Says one micheal fish....
I've also noted that in the paper they list where the speed traps are going to be... Something i've only ever seen in the leicester mercury back home.
And there is movement to bring a rugby league team to adelaide... Tim sheens, a coach for west tigers (winners of the grand final in 2005) said it would good to bring tgg back to adelaide... Either create a new team (a la gold coast) or move an existing one....

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12:30
whilst reading the paper this morning they were advertising little britain live. The show is on this weekend, 2 shows, one saturday one sunday. so after some shopping and a quick bite to eat, we dump the shopping at our room and go buy tickets for the sunday showing. We then jump in a taxi and head to penfolds winery. The taxi driver was quite canny... A man of late middle age who was born in adelaide. I asked him a few questions about adelaide.. Where is nice to live etc.. And he bored us with stories of how his a/c was packing in.
we arrived at the winery, which is a 20minute drive from the city centre. I don't remember going up hill at any time, but when we got out of the cab, the view back on adelaide and the sea beyond was spectacular. The winery itself is on the edge of adelaide in a leafy suburb. Its set back from the road, surrpunded by small vineyards. Me made our way to the cellar doors to await our guide, finding a nice spot on the grass to sun ourselves.

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16:00
lee and i have been very lucky with tours in the past, with respect to the size of groups we have been with. For example, when we did a bridge climb, ther wer etwo others, wheres if we had booked ourselves 10minutes later, we would have been in a group of 20... We had the same luck again. A potential of 20 people turned out to be just ourselves... So we pretty much had a private tour and tasting session.
now penfolds is famous in the uk for its kanoonga hill and rawsons retreat wines. This winery is the smaller specialised winery. Traditionally a much larger vineyard that specialised in medisinal ports, the site is much smaller and only represents a fraction of the produced wines under the penfold name (theres a much larger vineyard out in the clare valley, a couple of hours drive from adelaide). We were greated by ashley, behind a bar in the celler door of the site. A pome from bedford, we chatted about australia and adelaide and living and working over here. He introduced us to mark, our guide. He began the tour by showing us the vineyards, then described the winemaking process, showing us the rooms where they carry it all out. We then went through the history of the company brand and site. We looked at how the wines are stored.. And then we had our tasting session in the main celler store, 50ft under ground. It was an amazing setting... Much like a cavern...
a table was set up with white table cloth, 7 glasses and a plate of cheese, water biscuits and other nibbles. We were instant connoisseurs.... using all sorts of adjectives to describe the wines.... When the tour was over we retired to the celler, where we sampled a few other delights from the penfold range.... If it was a selling ploy... It worked.. As we secured 3 bottles of wine in the process. We then ordered a cab, sat in the sun as we waited.. And poured ourselves into it when it arrived.

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17:00
Cars ordered... A holden commodore, with sat nav... why Sat Nav?

A. We've already established that Lee can't read maps
B. Its a gadget i can hav a play with.

We pick it up in the morning, and we can leave the keys behind reception in our hotel for them to pick up on monday morning. its not us being lazy... We are flying off to kangaroo island early monday morning.
we returned to the hotel and had a glass of wine in the bar. We were served by a young lady from england, living in adelaide. I took the opportunity to pump her for info about living in adelaide. The barmaid, racheal, has family that live in adelaide, and she lives here with them as she has a little girl. There was a small warning about the employment market, and that jobs although are not few and far between but fiercely contested, even down to your toilet cleaners...
Again i push the large numbers of weirdo's; racheal acknowledged that the place was partial to the odd random. We were just about to get to some nitty gritty.. And a whole coach load of 'wallace arnold' types arrived at the bar.. So lee and i retired to some sofa's to sip our wine and discuss what we had learnt so far on the trip whilst racheal plied her trade....

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