25/10/21 It's Become A Habit: Adelaide

Distilling the day into a couple of paragraphs and some photos has become a habit, such that I find it hard to stop. As a result, despite saying yesterday that I was finished, here I am with an update.

Yesterday we discovered that Buddy, being blind, lost us easily. If we were quiet and he couldn't hear us, he stood up and barked in order to get a response. It took a while and a couple of jump-out-of-my-skin moments for me to realise that all he needed was to know where we were. 

Hello? Are you still there?

This morning he was duly walked, fed, medicated, watered and loved.  Given that he is used to being at home all day alone while his owner works, we had no qualms about leaving him and walking off to explore Port Adelaide.

The Port was a curious mixture of industry, commerce, and all manner of homes from decrepit historical stone cottages, through big blocks of public housing, to grand and expensive mansions along the river. Old industrial buildings jostled side by side with swanky housing developments and trendy cafes. Grape vines adorned the long verandahs of the old pubs and a 4-story stone flour mill, defunct the last 30 years, towered over a children's playground where the play equipment was custom built to mimic the machinery that once throbbed inside the Mill. 

The Yelta was built at the Cockatoo Island shipyard in Sydney Harbour, and is the last functioning steam tug in Australia.  Not that it does any tugging any more, instead it's owned by the Maritime Museum and takes people on tours around the harbour.

War has also touched Port Adelaide: Forts Larga and Malta may never have fired a gun in anger or defence, but many a lad boarded a boat here on his way to distant conflicts and only some of them came back.   

An unexpected pleasure in Port Adelaide was the street art that bloomed where least expected.

In the afternoon Roger took advantage of the beautiful weather and pedaled off into the sunshine on his bicycle. I rang the bike shop about my bike and discovered that I had to to wait a day or two to collect my wheels. I took Buddy for a walk instead, which alas did not compare (no offence intended to Buddy, of course).  In the meantime Roger very thoughtfully sent me lots of photos of the wonderful time he was having cycling beside the beach.  He's kind like that.

End of the land: the Outer Harbour.

Humph.