Adelaide!

So we arrived in Adelaide after our trip on the Great Ocean Road.  Our initial plan was… I don’t know, we still hadn’t figured that one out yet.  But our idea was to find one of the relocation camper vans and head out into the outback to a place called Alice Springs and go visit Ayers Rock.  That lasted about 2 days till we decided that it might be hard to find another car from Alice Springs to Darwin and rides up there seemed impossible to find.

 

With almost all of our options exhausted we decided to look at buying a car as it was going to cost the same as renting.  As we were in the lounge of our hostel discussing whether or not to buy a vehicle a guy our age comes in and starts talking to us. We tell him what were up to and he says he did the same thing. Except, his vehicle made it a couple thousand miles into the outback and then a crucial part fell off the engine and the car died. They had to hitchhike out of the outback, not an easy task. Okay now we were really debating what to do, go safe and rent a camper van or take a risk and purchase a car.  For those of you who haven’t seen our most recent facebook pages, the latter is what we chose.  As Teala would say “YOLO!” We found this bad ass Chrysler Voyager minivan that is all decked out with a bed, stove, cooking supplies, a whole bunch of other stuff… and a surf board.  It is official, we were moving into a minivan.

But before I get too off track let me jump back to Adelaide.  It was an awesome town and I wish we were able to spend a month or two there because we both really enjoyed it.  After getting out of the fast paced city life of Melbourne, Adelaide was much smaller and more relaxed.  If we were still planning on staying in Australia and working, we decided this would be the city we would have stayed in, well, of the two cities we have seen. Work seemed easier to find here and the people were so friendly.

We happened to arrived in Adelaide exactly at the right time because there was a festival going on called “Fringe Fest”.  It was a city wide, month long festival with stuff going on every day.  They have concerts, comedians, circus performers, cabarets, etc. The whole city becomes a venue for this festival, churches, public buses, stadiums, auditoriums, basically anywhere in the city was game. Unfortunately, we only were able to enjoy it for three days but we got the most out of it while we were there.  The first night there was live bands with a huge 2 hour parade with some amazing fireworks afterwards.  There were comedians who flew in from all over the world so the second night we ended up going to a show that was super funny and following the show we found the “Garden of Unearthly Delights” a park full of delicious foods.   Our final night, I left the show choice up to Teala and she came back with tickets to the East Enders Dirty Talk Cabaret.  Neither of us knew what a cabaret was, so we knew it would be interesting. What a show that was, I don’t even know how to describe it!   I don’t think we stopped laughing for the entire hour of the show. The two girls that put the show would randomly pull guys out of the crowd to join the show.  Besides laughing, I was scared to death they were going to choose me and make me do some crazy stuff on stage.  They sang hilarious “dirty” songs while performing little skits. It was very fun.

The following day was the day we were suppose to pick up our van and head north to Alice Springs, eventually making our way all the way up to Darwin.   About 2 hours before picking up our vehicle a girl walked into the hostel and started talking to us.  Soon we find out that she has just come from Darwin and in between Darwin and Alice Springs the roads are flooded knee deep and they only way you can get through is with a four wheel drive vechile.  Now I understand why every four wheel drive vehicle has a snorkel on it!!! 

After hearing this, Teala and I just looked at each other like what the hell are we supposed to do now!!  So we had to make a quick decision and we decided to switch our entire route around.  We are now going to Sydney then driving up the east coast and if there is enough time come down the middle of the country. We went and bought our new home, packed it with our bags and groceries, and off we went on the 22 hour ride to Sydney.