Today the car was due at Stillwell Ford for it's 15,000km service. We turned up about 930, left the car for their attention and took advantage of the courtesy car into town.
We walked up and down Rundle Mall, checking out some of the large and glossy department stores before walking down King William Street to Victoria Square and thence into the Central Markets. One thing for sure, the howling wind was glacial and we both froze our chops off before gratefully turning into the marketplace itself.
These markets are quite similar to the Vic Markets in Melbourne but with more emphasis on fresh food and goodies and almost none of the tat that makes up a lot of the Vic. We took coffee and a yummy Portuguese Tart and a Lemon Flan at Lucia's, not the only coffee shop there but probably the best that we saw. After marching up and down all the aisles and back and forth across all the rows, we went back up toward Rundle Mall looking for lunch and perhaps a visit to the SA Museum.
Lunch we took in one of the malls, a delightful hot roast beef roll and potato bake. Just the thing to try and get the body temperature back up. We made it into the museum after a fair old wander about the shopping precinct, but in shades of our days in London all those years ago, we were too tired and too footsore to be bothered. Another coffee was called. We did actually walk into the museum proper and I for one was ready to walk right back out. I had forgotten that these places still exist; it's chock full of stuffed animals from all over the world, quite a few of which are now extinct, largely due to this sort of collecting by our ancestors. I went in expecting things from the Aboriginal culture and from the European settlement that started in 1836 as a social experiment to build a utopian society as espoused by Edward Wakefield while in goal in London.
We left the museum and were heading for the courtesy car pick-up point when we took a side-track into the SA Library. They were having a display of prints from The Forgotten Diggers, a collection of some 800 glass photo negatives found in a barn in Vignacourt in France depicting Australian WWI soldiers in a studio setting. The collection was purchased by Kerry Stokes AC and donated to the Australian War memorial in 2012. Now that is philanthropy! The photos are truly stunning in their clarity and quality but the sheer fact that someone, obviously a professional photographer, had the time, wherewithal and inclination to systematically photograph so many servicemen during such a period of turmoil is unbelievable. Almost as unbelievable as the fact that these glass plates survived intact and the images intact for a 100 years in a draught French barn.
Finally we were back at Stillwell Ford. First pleasant experience: 'All costs covered by Ford Australia sir, there is nothing to pay'. No nastily little surprises here then. Second pleasant surprise. The car had been hand-washed (they initially said they could only machine was it) and vacuumed out. It looked and smelt like the now car I had forgotten that it is. Well done them.
Anyhow, back at the van Judy took some time out with a book, a cuppa and the telly, I put a pair of shorts on and went for a long walk, barefoot, along the beach relishing in the lovely soft sand under my feet and the 'refreshing' waters of the ocean lapping at my ankles. Ah, Lovely!
No snaps today, just couldn't be bothered carting camera around all day.
