3/07/22 Petanque Personalities at the End of the Line

"I'm the mentor and Petanque trainer. They call me the tormentor. See, they gave me this cap at our annual meeting. I teach the newbies how to play and I'm tough. I don't let them get away with bad playing.

We spend all Sunday here. We play and hang out at the club house.

Petanque was invented by a fella in a wheelchair, hence you have to stand still when launching the ball and we pick up the metal balls with a magnet on a string."

How, you may ask, did we come to be learning about the game of petanque from the Tormentor in Gawler?

Well it all started with the trains.

Last year we set out to ride all of the Adelaide Metro, but we didn't include the Gawler line because it was running boring buses while the line was being electrified. Just when we relaxed, thinking we'd ridden every available meter of rail, the Gawler line opened and blow me down we had a whole new line to ride and with shiny new electric trains too! 

Actually due to supply issues only one in four trains on the line were electric, a fact that caused endless grief and much reportage of sad faces in the Adelaide news. We had no intention of catching an old rail motor and sallied forth fully prepared to camp on the Adelaide Central platform until an electric train came along for Gawler.

Waiting for the train at Hallett Cove, a ho hum moment because we'd already travelled this line.

No one said this was going to be quick.

As it turned out we didn't have to camp on the platform at all. We jumped off our Hallett Cove train, walked to the next platform, checked out the electric credentials of the shiny new Gawler train, and settled in for our epic journey through the northern badlands of Adelaide.

See? Shiny and new!  The train that is.

The new train took us right past the old Adelaide Gaol,

Tired old gaol.

and entered a wasteland of transport industry, distribution centres, and railway graveyards.

Tired old locomotive.

We worked hard to maintain the excitement, but there's only so much excitement can be maintained during a train ride through industry and the occasional suburb.  Just as it was all getting too hard to sustain we pulled in to Gawler and everyone had to get off the train because we had reached the northernmost end of the Adelaide Metro.

Proof of arrival.

The line went on, but the train stopped here.

Gawler fiercely maintains its place at the bottom of the Barossa, as distinct from the top of Adelaide.  It wouldn't surprise me at all if they built a big fence just to ensure that those nasty northern suburbs stayed  over the hill and out of sight and mind. We walked up the main street and looked at all the beautiful old buildings.

When we ran out of old buildings we walked a loop along the river. Gawler sits on the junction of two creeks rivers: the South Para and the North Para. They join in downtown Gawler to create the Para Para River, clearly demonstrating that no one stretched their imagination muscles when it came to naming rivers in Gawler.

A Para River.

A Para River bridge showing two distinct levels of construction. They had to build it higher due to floods.

While walking beside the river we saw a game of Pentaque being played. When we went up to the fence to watch the Tormentor came over to say hello and that is how we learnt all about Petanque on a Sunday afternoon in Gawler.

We had an hour to kill before the next train south, so we went and ate way too much good food in one of Gawler's lovely old pubs and then rolled happily back to the train. Which was fortuitously electric so we again avoided an enforced platform stay.

I think I can.

I know I did.

There were some loud people on the train: we eavesdropped shamelessly. They too had caught the train purely for the thrills of riding the new line and eating too much good food in Gawler. It was nice to know that we weren't the only ones looking for cheap thrills on a newly electrified train line.

We finished the day with a spot of sunset appreciation from our front door.

Not a tropical sunset.