Ryan and I tried to
book a trip to Fiji over our Christmas break, but that didn't work out so we
decided to go back to our favourite spot in South Australia: McLaren Vale. We rented a small cabin in a vineyard and had
a perfect vacation.
We started by
spending Friday night with our friends Janah and Luke playing board games,
since they live near McLaren Vale (and we had been talking about doing a board
game night forever!) After a wonderful
evening, and an amazing homemade breakfast, we headed off to the Willunga
Markets to pick up some fresh produce for our weekend. Then we checked in to our beautiful cabin at
McLaren Ridge. It was so peaceful we
actually had breakfast on the porch every morning and spent a lot of time
reading out there too.
Since I've written
about McLaren Vale so many times I'm just going to skip the repeat stuff and
write about the new things that we did.
The idea behind the trip was that if we spent a few days in the region,
we could both do some wine tasting.
Usually I end up driving, but this time we took turns. We even took it a step further and rented
bikes on one of the days. I have to
confess, I really don't like bike riding.
I have no idea why since I used to do it all of the time as a kid, but I
just don't. Ryan wanted to rent a tandem
bike, but that was out of the question.
We decided to go to
the furthest winery first, just in case I wussed out, so we biked the 3.1km
from the bike shop to d'Arenburg, which was pretty much all uphill. Without all of the details, suffice it to say
that we made it but we were very sweaty by the end of it. The view was beautiful but the place was
completely packed so we did our wine tasting and went on our way.
Since there were
lots of wineries on the 3km road back to the cycle shop, we decided to just
ride back down the hill and stop along the way.
That brought us to an awesome new place for us called Tapestry. Their wine was delicious and their lunch
platter was amazing! We also did a bike
photo shoot after lunch - I just had to have proof that I was riding a bike!
After that we
decided we had had enough wine, so we stopped at an art gallery, the grocery
store, and a little shop and restaurant in a train car called "The Almond
Train". Every time we go to McLaren
Vale I want to go there, and finally Ryan agreed to check it out. Free flavoured almond samples! What more could you want?!
That evening, and
pretty much every evening, we just played board games and drank wine. It was exactly how we wanted to spend our
vacation.
The next day we
decided to check out the beach, and we randomly ran into our friend (and Ryan's
old boss) Andy. He lives in the area and
he invited us to his family's New Year's Party.
We don't really know that many people, so it just goes to show you how
small Adelaide is if even WE run into people we know! Anyway, the beach was beautiful, as they
always are in South Australia.
For our last full
day in McLaren Vale we decided to have lunch at our favourite place
(Leconfield) and then go on a hike. We
had a map from the visitor centre, but for the life of us we could not find the
hike. Even when we got to the right
parking lot we still managed to walk down the wrong trail. The funniest thing was, though, that we were
just blaming it on poor signage, and Ryan insisted we were on the right
track. He kept pointing to where we were
on our map and showing me all of these elevation patterns to prove it. Turns out, though, we weren't even close to
the right area. Eventually we did find a
really nice lookout and the correct trail, but it was the middle of the day in
Australian summer and we were out of water, so we didn't ever actually do the
hike we had planned.
That night we went
to Andy's house to celebrate New Year's Eve.
His house is on a hill and he just build a new balcony that overlooks
all of the suburbs and the ocean, so at midnight we could see all of the
fireworks along the beach and all through the suburbs. It was an awesome evening with great friends
to end off our wonderful mini-vacation.
