Easter Weekend: Day Trips

Easter Weekend: Day Trips

Friday: Stirling and Botanical Gardens

Welcome back to my blog. I'll add more about school shortly as I'm coming to the end of term 1 and I have a lot of thoughts about that, but for now I'm going to talk about my day trips this weekend. (Check out the bottom of the page for a map of where we went). We live in the Adelaide hills and very close to Stirling which has a great selection of restaurants and deciduous trees to look at during autumn (not fall, you will be made fun of in Australia if you say 'fall'). We probably spend the greatest amount of time here and the kids love to play at the park here and climb the gum trees. We took the opportunity this weekend to go back to the Mount
Lofty botanical gardens to see the leaf colours. We enjoyed our time and will be back to see the changes. I've been told it is quite something. Anything is better than Calgary's brown and yellow.

We walked over to the gardens as it was only about 20 degrees Celsius outside. The last time we were here it was above 30 and much more bearable. Autumn is comparable to late spring/early summer in Calgary. We saw a sign saying Autumn colours will be on display in the gardens from Easter to Mother's Day.

So many cockatoos in the hills

Looks like a great place for a picnic

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Saturday: St. Kilda's Adventure Playground

 On the recommendation of someone from work, we went to St. Kilda's adventure playground on Saturday. It was huge! the kids had a blast exploring and going on all the slides. However they had the most fun looking under rocks for bugs and crabs.

 We went for a walk on what looked like a really long jetty made out of rocks and spotted a lot of bird-life. Apparently there is a bird sanctuary here. We saw pelicans, black swans what I assume are cranes and of course seagulls.

There is a lot of fishing and crabbing here. You can apparently find a lot of blue swimmer crabs and pick them out with your hands if you are quick. We ended up finding two puffer fish who were trapped in the rocks.

Sunday: Victor Harbour

On Sunday, after the time change and after Henry woke everyone up at 5am to tell us the Easter bunny had come we went to Victor Harbour (yes, I am spelling it with a u). It  is a bit of a tourist trap sea-side town, but looked fun and was on our list of places to explore. It was full of touristy fun things to do including a midway, pony and camel rides. On the negative side we spent way too much time trying to find a place to park.

 There's a horse drawn tramway down the jetty that attaches Victor Harbour to Granite Island. (A small island largely made out of Granite... yep) The rock formations here are quite interesting with several shaped by erosion into curious shapes that the kids wanted to climb all over.

Hey, I figured out how to use my timer!

Henry tried his best to be unimpressed

Look at the guy in the corner. Note the lack of any fencing! Henry wanted to climb down...

We walked around the entire island and everyone was very tired by the time we got home.

Monday: Murray Bridge

By Monday we were prepared and went to Murray Bridge because Miles wanted to go fishing and because we hadn't visited the Murray river yet. We got a picnic and took advantage of all the self-serve BBQs that seem to be in every Australian park.

We chatted with a man from lake country in England who had been living in Australia for 3 years. He came to live here because of the weather and could sympathize with wanting to get away from our winters.

You just press a button to heat up these BBQs and cook. We need these in Canada!

Lots of paddleboats and houseboats on the river

Miles enjoying the red sand beach

Here's where we went this weekend:

Adelaide Cup weekend

Choir of Man

We went on a bit of a trip this weekend. It started off with us attending the Adelaide Fringe and seeing the Choir of Man show with staff from Stradbroke School.

The Garden of Unearthly Delights

The Fringe is an ongoing festival with all kinds of artistic shows, comedians, musicians, buskers and great food.

Art on the sides of silos

Check out the map below to see our trip. We drove through a number of small South Australian towns on our way and I was amazed by how much it reminded me of parts of Alberta.

Marsupial lion

We started off by going to the Naracoorte caves and got there in time to see Victoria cave, which had the fossils of the marsupial lion.

We ended up camping in a bush bell tent in Coonawara which was about 20 minutes south of Naracoorte. The setup was very nice and we had a vineyard right next door and sampled some of their wine.

We headed over to Robe the next day and saw some extraordinary limestone cliffs and amazing beaches. There were also what looked like lava rocks on the beach.

We walked down the pathway and made our way down to a secluded area where the boys climbed on the rocks and found shells and crab exoskeletons everywhere.

We noticed there was an amazing looking semi-circle beach on the other side of the car park so we walked over there next. This was probably the best beach we saw and the kids had fun on the rocks their mother's dismay. I enjoyed all of the pools around the rocks and how white the sand was. If only it was a bit warmer and not as windy we would have enjoyed it more. I guess when summer comes around again we will be coming down here again before we leave.

Robe has an obelisk on a big cliff jutting out into the ocean so we had to go for a closer look.

The next day we drove to Kingston and found the Big Lobster, unfortunately the restaurant is for sale. Looks like it would be a great business opportunity! (Comes with giant lobster)

After that, we went to the biggest, beach ever just north of Kingston. It was very windy so we couldn't eat our lunch here as planned. We ended up just eating in the car park and after taking some pictures.

On our way home we stopped in Meningie to take a bathroom break and play at the park. We then headed just a few kilometres north and stopped at Meningie's pink lake. It is probably better from an aerial perspective as it was a bit disappointing.

Our trip this weekend

School in Australia

School in Australia is both the same as Canada and completely different. Let me explain... Everything I've ever done is still me teaching the way I've always taught, and I have a lot of freedom in Australia to do that. However, I am doing so in a completely different culture. I would compare the difference to when I started teaching in Morley, Alberta on a First Nations reserve. There are little things all day long that everyone takes for granted that I had no idea to expect until they happen.

For example, This is not the entrance to my school, this is the entrance to my classroom.

When I open the door in the morning the kids all come in (just like Canada) as well as all of their parents (not like Canada). In fact for Canadians this is very weird. Students are often dropped off or the bus drops them off and very rarely do parents come join their kids in the classroom for the first 5-15 minutes of the day. I figured that maybe it was just because it was the first day of school and I was a new Canadian teacher, but it continued to happen everyday. I'm guessing the influence of school shootings in the US has led to more of a lock down approach to schools in Canada that hasn't happened in Australia. I'm not saying it is a bad thing, I'm just saying it is different and took a bit to get used to.

Other smaller issues are words like "recess" meaning different things in Canada and Australia. In Canada, recess means we send kids outside to play and get some exercise. In Australia it means a hearty snack and maybe some playtime after that.

It took me until Wednesday to figure this out. I kept sending the kids out at recess and they would come back in saying they didn't have recess. I would be confused by this because they just came in the door. They would say, "but we didn't eat," but I countered that we had snack right before recess. Well the snack before recess is apparently "Brain Break" and they are supposed to only eat fruit during this time. "Recess" is for eating something more substantial. Now I do it the right way!

Acquaintance night happened on Tuesday which was day 7 of school in week 2 as they like to call it. I had all of the parents join me for a PowerPoint presentation at 6pm on who I was and how I would be teaching. I also provided sign ups for classroom volunteering. I think it went well and I had many parents join me to talk afterwards and ask questions well after the time limit of half an hour.

I'm about to start Week 3 of term 1 tomorrow. I hopefully get most of it right and don't make the lunch lady mad that I forgot to send in the lunch order in again.