To Adelaide – 1/13/13
Jan 14th, 2013 by admin
We up and gone early. We’re headed to Adelaide today and the ride is through the inland flatland that leads up from the coast. It’s not much of a ride but it is a long ways.
We’re headed to Adelaide to meet up with a couple of Aussie motorcycle riders, Stuart and Tom, that we met in Vladivostok in September. When we left them in Vladivostok, we told them that we would be in Oz after the New Year and the extended an invitation to stop by when we were in Adelaide. Well, here we are.
Well, almost. We’re about 60 kilometers from Adelaide and I call Stuart to give him a heads up. I had already emailed him about 10 days earlier to give him an approximate date for our arrival. That had slipped a bit but here we were.
He gives me the address of a restaurant in Seacliff, 20 kilometers or so south of Adelaide and we set up a time to meet: 5:30 PM. See you then.
We are coming into Adelaide from the west and the restaurant is in the southern suburbs. The plug the address into the GPS but it can’t find Seacliff so we put in Brighton which is the next town to the north. I put the address into Google Maps on my phone and John find Seacliff in the map book that we have been using. Off we go to the Seacliff Tavern.
At first, the GPS, Google and John all agree. I’m driving and John’s navigating. Everything goes fine until we stop for gas and get off route when we start moving again. The GPS is telling us to follow one route (of course, it’s trying to take us to Brighton). Google is insisting that we take another route (it thinks, correctly, that we are going to Seacliff). John has still another route. We finally settle on a majority decision between the three of them with John usually winning out. But we do get there.
We’re early so a short walk on the sea front. The water is flat as a sheet of glass and there are a few fishing boats off shore. Then into the Tavern to wait for Stuart.
We order a couple of dark beers (Toomey Old, yummy) and watch cricket while we’re waiting. Soon 5:30 comes and goes and then 6:00 PM, too. Finally, at 6:20 I go up the bar to check the time. We’re an hour early. They’re not late – we’re very early.
When I called Stuart, I asked him what time it was. He told me 2:30 but I misunderstood him and thought he said 3:30. The bigger surprise was that I thought he said that the timezone wasn’t an hour difference from Victoria, it was 30 minutes. In fact, it’s an hour and30 minutes. We haven’t heard the official explanation for that yet.
At 5:30 promptly (corrected South Australia time), Stuart arrives and we recognize each other immediately. In about 30 seconds, we’re right back in the conversation we were last having in Vladivostok. About 10 minutes later, Tom and his wife, Iris, show up and the war stories just get more intense and the laughs louder. Beer is flowing pretty good, too.
We talk for about an hour and then order some dinner. The food is pretty good, the beer is pretty good, the conversation is great. But after a couple of hours we have to break up. Stuart is flying north on business in the morning. Tom is off (he’s a police detective) but Iris (a customs fraud investigator) has to work so we break up.
Stuart invited us to stay at his house for the night but Tom and Iris are leaving. We say our goodbyes and follow Stuart back to his house. Along the way, Tom calls Stuart and tells him that he’s on his way overto join u. He struck a deal with Iris: he’d clean the house in the morning if he came over to join us tonight. He’ll be here in 10 minutes.
We spend the night drinking wine and then move to port that Stuart got in a deal. All the while, us trading stories of our adventures this past summer. They were gone for 9 weeks, us for 6. We went to some common places, they did more of the I-don’t-care-istans. One their memories would trigger one of ours. Stuart brings out the Imac and shows us some of his videos. The vivid blue, cloudless skies of somewhere we’ve all been justs brings back even more memories.
But eventually, we have to stop. Tom has to clean the house in the morning. Stuart has to catch a plane. We have to head north toward the outback. It’s goodnight and off to bed.
Obi-wan