24/04/2022 Finishing Unfinished Business (Again): Adelaide

When we were first in Adelaide, back in November, we set out to ride the trains over the entire Adelaide Metro network, not counting the Gawler line which was (and is) undergoing upgrades and had buses instead of trains.  A couple of days ago Roger realised with horror that we had not yet ridden the branch line out to Flinders, and if that sounds familiar it's because this isn't the first time we've missed entire branch lines (see here).  The line to Flinders wasn't long - only four stations - but you can't say you've ridden an entire network if there are four stations and an entire branch line missing, so off we went to rectify the matter.

Despite being on a train riding adventure, we spent most of the time riding our bikes. In fact, we went quite a long way out of our way in order to include the Torrens Linear Path and the Western Bikeway on our way to the train station.

Most of the ride was on dedicated bike paths, some of them prettier than others. This was not one of the prettiest.

Thankfully most of it was more like this.

Along the way we saw some interesting things;

Tennis. The park was near a tennis court which was surrounded by high fences. Beware of dangerous escaped tennis balls. We kept our wits about us, and survived.

Dogs did not warrant a warning sign, being obviously less threatening than tennis balls. They were required to be sorted by size, however, with a handy dog-measuring guide supplied. A similar concept to fish-measuring guides I guess, but you can't throw the dog back if it's the wrong size.

After a depressingly unhealthy lunch at McDonalds we caught the train on the Flinders line with surprisingly little fanfare for such an auspicious moment.

The train was shiny, new, and electric. Adelaide has lots of old diesel rail motors so riding in a shiny new electric train was a little bit of a thrill.

I left the train at Woodland Park, because my plan was to finish off the Stuart River bike path and then head home around the airport, in order to complete a circuit of the airport. Which was not really necessary but satisfied my desire to join dots and ride around airports.

Behind the airport I found a secret ibis hangout.  The ibis were not at all disturbed by the planes roaring overhead at regular intervals.

Back at home we looked at the map of the Adelaide Metro very closely, just to make sure that there weren't any other sneaky branch lines in there that we hadn't found yet.  Then we put the Gawler line on notice that as soon as they have trains on it, we will be there.
 

The bike bits.

The train bit.