Things I Did While In Belair: Part 1

The end of our Belair stay is imminent.  The cat, sensing an increase in packing up, sorting, and cleaning, has ramped up it's manifestations of Psychokitty, and Winter has gasped its last. Roger and the Psychokitty both sought sunny spots to recharge, leaving me seriously questioning their warm-blooded status, and I've almost finished walking every trail in Belair National Park.  Along the way we've had some minor adventures so here, in the interests of my future failing memory, is a small overview of Things We Did While In Belair.

1.  We visited the Mt Lofty Botanic Gardens, where the trees were just starting to bud into leaf, and found some sculptures with which to pose.

Established in 1959, the Mt Lofty Botanic Gardens "provided a systematic ecological approach to using each of Mount Lofty’s valleys to represent geographic regions of the world and leaving the ridges in their natural state". I'm not sure where the sculptures fit in - natural state or geographic region?

Light on tree ferns.

A very nice lady offered to take a photo of the two of us together.

 

2.  I rode my bike down the hill to... anywhere else, really. It was a fast ride.  Sometimes it was scary.  I really wanted to know which smart cookie put the right-angle right hand bend at the end of the 20% grade, thus removing the opportunity for foolish people to go really, really fast and instead requiring them to have brakes that worked really, really well.  Which mine did, I'm glad to say.

If I had an errand or appointment in the city it was easy to zoom down the hill and zip into town along the Rugby St Greenway. Did I ride my bike back up the hill on my return journey?  Of course not, that feat is purely for the Lycra People: I caught the train. The train was slow but effortless, apart from the need to fight for a spot on the train along with all the teenagers taking their mountain bikes up to Pinera so that they could ride the dirt trails back down again.

3.  I explored the city in the course of running errands.

I'm watching you.

Wet Adelaide.

I have holes in my head.

City pigeons.

Dancing in the city.  Nothing to tell me who they are or why they're dancing.  Maybe they're just happy. Or is she throwing the baby away?  Surely not!

4. Sometimes I just walked the local streets looking for beautiful old houses:

Beautiful building which had a long and varied history: a private home; school; TB sanatorium; Repatriation Hospital; drug and alcohol rehabilitation centre; and now a private home again.

and pianos in the wild,

Every year it gets a little more decrepit.

and more beautiful old buildings.

Originally built as the Belair Inebriates Retreat, a delightfully quaint name for a not-so-quaint purpose.  The building served time as a theological and missionary training school with a period of overlap when the inebriates and theological/missionary students shared the facility.  It was then used for educational purposes by several different institutions before becoming part of St John's Grammar School.  Somewhere on the school grounds, their exact position not known, are the graves of Gustav and Maria Ludewig, along with Gustav's second wife and the (possibly) original settler of Belair whose name was (ta-dahh) Belair.

The climate of Belair, being on top of the hill and cooler than the Adelaide plains, was considered to be conducive to good health and a robust constitution.  Thus Belair boasted, in addition to Birralee and the Inebriates Home, the Kalyara Sanatorium for Consumptives.  Alas, the Sanitorium has been through its own metamorphosis and is now an aged care facility with no sign (from the street anyway) of what may or may not have been another grand old building.

So there you have it, some of the mildly interesting things that can be found or done in and around Belair.  There's more, mind you, but right now I have to go pay attention to a Psychokitty, lest she lose the plot altogether and sharpen her claws on her owners' nice new lounge.

Human!  Come do my bidding!