Ok, one month later! Here is a snapshot of our last two days in Adelaide during our winter school holidays. I wrote about our drive from Melbourne to Adelaide here and our first two days here.
Our third day was a cold and cloudy day. We started the day with a visit to our house. Yes that's right, our house! Over the past 18 months we've been having a house built as an investment property, and it was completed and has been rented out since May. We figured we should actually check out this place we'd invested in so we drove the 40km or so out of Adelaide to a suburb full of new build houses - very reminiscent of the house we moved into when I was about 7 years old, that my parents still live in.
Anyway, that part of the holiday was pretty uneventful and a bit boring for the kids, so we looked around the area for something a bit more exciting for them and discovered Gorge Wildlife Park. The park advertised kangaroo feeding and being able to hold a koala so we figured this would be a great place for the kids.
The park was so much more than we were expecting! It is a family owned animal sanctuary, with an impressive variety of animals - many that are roaming free among the grounds. The kids spent a long time feeding the kangaroos, including some albino kangaroos which I'd never seen before!
Once our bags of kangaroo feed were empty Ollie and I spent a long time watching the spider monkeys. Most entertaining was seeing them scamper across the tree branches and steal food from each other.
Another type of monkey at the park was the Capuchin monkey who we were able to interact with. We put some food in it's basket and watched it pull the basket up to eat. So cute!
An animal I'd not heard of before was a capybara. This is the largest living rodent and is native to South America. It looks just like a huge guinea pig.
After a good 2-3 hours we were ready for the main event... cuddling a koala! Unfortunately Ollie was too young to do this so only Ella got to do the honors, but we were all able to give him a pat as well. HE was a heavy little guy! He munched happily on the eucalyptus leaves while Ella got a cuddle and we all had some pictures.
On our last full day in Adelaide we woke up to a beautiful winter morning. This was the view from our apartment:
We decided to spend the morning on the Adelaide Coastal Walk Path, which goes from the suburb of Glenelg, where we were staying, to Brighton Beach, about 4.2km away. The kids had their scooters and we weren't sure how far we would get, but figured we'd have a few stops along the way.
Here we are at the beginning of the walk in Glenelg:
We had to scoot along the Glenelg boardwalk before going on the path:
About 1 km into our walk we stopped by this dolphin sculpture while Andy got us some coffees and treats.
Very close to Brighton we saw some actual dolphins playing in the water. They were extremely close to shore, I'd say 10-20m away at the most. They stayed in our area for a while and we ran down to the beach to get a closer look. This was super exciting, I cannot get over seeing dolphins swimming so close to land!
Of course that meant we had to take a break, playing on the beach for a while. The weather was so nice at this stage, it was lovely to just enjoy the sunshine and gaze out at the water while the kids happily played in the sand and splashed around in the shallow water.
A few more pics from the first half of our walk:
We stopped for a well deserved brunch on the main street in Brighton.
Lunch was of course followed by an ice cream:
After that we were well fueled and ready for the 4km scoot/walk back to Glenelg. The weather held up and was stunning the whole way back.
After nearly 9km of walking and scooting the kids were not ready to go back to the hotel. We had to have one last play at the seaside playground in Glenelg.
That evening we had one last sauna and pool session in the hotel. We all slept very well after our day of outdoor exercise.
The next morning we packed up the hotel and got ready for our drive home, this time taking a different (longer) route along the coast. But that's a story for another post!
Comments