Morning Tea in the Watchman House.

There I was, riding (or more accurately sitting aboard while gravity did its thing) my bicycle beside Minno Creek in the Coromandel Valley, enjoying the sunlight and shadows of a day where the temperature (21C!!) promised future summers,

 

 when I saw a handwritten sign propped against a small stone cottage right next to the bike trail.

"Morning Tea" said the sign. "$5. Marmalade for sale."

A small lady in a pink cardigan popped out of the cottage, followed by a portly fellow (his cardigan was blue) who hovered on the edges of our conversation and offered historical corrections as Pink Cardigan elaborated on the history of the cottage.

"I'm here for morning tea," I said, visions of a teapot with scones and cream floating before my eyes.

"Yes, come in! We've got marmalade too! Let me show you around the cottage!"

We explored the cottage, this being the unspoken morning tea tax.  The Watchman House much to my dismay, didn't watch anything.  Instead it was owned by the family Watchman and is now managed by the National Trust and a dedicated but diminishing number of volunteers of whom Mrs Pink Cardigan was one.  And she was lovely. After exhausting the informational possibilities of the cottage she delivered me to the back room where I found a veritable feast of home made goodies waiting for me, along with a fine collection of jolly geriatrics. 

These were all local Coromandel Valley people and they made quite clear that they were entirely distinct from both the 'hill people's and the 'plains people'. Unspoken, but quite well understood, was that those of the Coromandel Valley were of course cut from better cloth than those of hills and plains.

 

I decided to identify myself as a Queenslander rather than admit to currently residing in Belair, and settled in to eat rather too much of the available spread. After my third cup of coffee (in my defender the cups were tiny) I began to feel that I had consumed much more than $5 worth of morning tea, but Pink Cardigan would not allow me to pay extra so I bought a guilty bottle of marmalade instead and tucked it in my pannier with my peanut butter sandwiches.

Guilty marmalade.

 

Full of coffee, scones, and home-made cheese biscuits, I followed Minno Creek all the way to its junction with the Stuart River, and onwards to Horner's Bridge and the start of the Stuart Recreation Park. 

Built in 1886, Horner's Bridge was the first bridge built across the Stuart River, and was on the original Goolwa Road which was superseded when motor travel became possible, because the road was not conducive to traveling very fast.

 

I was sorely tempted to take a short cut through the Stuart Gorge Recreational Park, but there were too many youngsters spending their Saturday zooming down the bike trails, and I didn't want to show them up with the awesome slowness of my downhill bike skills (or break my marmalade) so I opted for the road instead.   That gave me a decent cardio workout until I finally crested the ridge and wound downhill through suburban streets all the way to Happy Valley Reservoir.

 

There were lots of little pathways and cut-throughs between the suburban streets.

 The reservoir was busy with skateboarders, walkers, bicyclist of all shapes and sizes, and walkers with and without a wide variety of dogs. The dogs reveled in the dual joys of being off leash and near water, and as I sat in the shade and ate my apple I was visited by several happy hounds in various states of wetness. 

From Happy Valley I followed the creek gently downhill, past suburban wetlands brimming with wrens, and on to the Coast to Vines rail trail.

Second lunch break.  Peanut butter sandwiches this time.  Now I had no cushioning for my guilty marmalade.

The trail got better and better, with fantastic downhills into the Onkaparinga wetlands.

I can always find time to stop for a quick bike posing photo.  There was a pelican on the lake, too.

 

See?

I arrived at Seaford Station having cycled a tad over 37km, causing me to do laps in the car park until I hit the magic 40. Then I locked my bike in the bike cages (I just discovered bike cages, wonderful inventions that they are!) and took myself to the shops a mere block away.  Of course that meant that by the time I walked back and liberated my bike from the cage I had the pleasure of waiting for the laggardly station lift while watching my train depart from the platform below me.

Waiting time.

 

Oh well, there's nothing like waiting 30min for the next train to provide a fine opportunity to watch as Adelaideans one and all caught public transport to and from the Royal Adelaide Show. The Adelaide  Advertiser proudly reported that the Royal Adelaide Show had the highest per capita attendance of any Royal Show in Australia but I guess it depended on how much (many?) capita you started with as to whether the numbers were impressive or not. There were lots of them though: fresh happy families heading in and frazzled, sugar-jazzed children with jaded weary parents on the way home.

The Onkaparinga wetlands, framed in the train window on the way home.

Back home I unpacked my pannier and discovered my guilty marmalade which had survived it's little journey by bicycle and train, and was put on a shelf to await my breakfast toast. Then I got out my calendar and pencilled in the date, four weeks hence, when the Watch House Cottage would again be providing morning tea.

I might just go and visit them again.