South Australia Week 1: New and Old Beginnings...
A week of new (and old) beginnings as we settle into our house in Carrickalinga, South Australia.
The reality that we are in Carrickalinga for ~2 months and then Naracoorte for ~3 weeks has not totally sunk in yet. We still feel like we need to over schedule ourselves for catch ups with friends and eat at the bakery every meal like we do when we are here for a 7-10 day holiday. Thankfully we have a lot more time than normal to be home, with family, with friends and visiting bakeries and pubs!
The weather is probably the most jarring new beginning so far. We had 37 deg. C (100 deg F) when we arrived in Adelaide for Halloween on October 31. But from then on it has been less than 20 deg C (<68 deg F) for the week and unseasonably rainy and windy. After 4 months of heat that was rough, exacerbated by the almost zero clothes we have for cold weather.
The NEW beginnings included:
Nora turned 4 years old this week! We had a little party and a LOT of bakery goodies sourced from two trips to the bakery on the day!
Scarlett started school at Yankalilla Area School on November 4. She has a wonderful teacher and we are meeting kids and their parents at pick ups and drop offs each day which is great. They also did a concert on Friday at lunch time where grades 1-5 all sang on this Australia wide choreographed video link up concert. Great stuff.
Parliament House of South Australia. Whitney and I had a wonderful tour and lunch at Parliament House which was really unique and fantastic.
Surf Life Saving Club (SLSC). We joined our family up at the Normanville SLSC where the annual membership for our whole family is an amazing $140 per year and Scarlett joins the kids training session every Saturday afternoon. The instructor was awesome and the kids all learned a lot and had a ton of fun doing activities on the beach and in the surf. Really awesome experience and as parents we were all helping out which was great too. Nora substituted in a few activities too when we needed an extra person for a race, it was a fun afternoon followed by a sausage sizzle!
The OLD beginnings included:
Watching the sunset over the ocean at Carrickalinga is among my earliest childhood memories when we had Christmas or summer holidays at this house, so it is awesome to be settling in to enjoy two months of sunsets!
Family and Friends Catch Ups. Love this time and love the fact that we don’t have to rush and that we will see many aunts, uncles, cousins and friends more than once. An amazing time to be with family and friends. My parents are staying with us the whole two months here and we are staying with them in Naracoorte.
Bakeries! Yankalilla and Normanville are the two nearby towns and they both have awesome bakeries. We are eating there like we are here for a few days… it is unsustainable but amazingly good and we will eventually work out how to reduce the intake. But for now we are crushing large numbers of pies, pasties & sausage rolls, vanilla slices, lamingtons, custard tarts, sprinkled and sugar donuts, cheese & bacon rolls, and the list goes on.
Kangaroos. They are everywhere and Scarlett and Nora are old enough to love it. We even saw a kangaroo hop down the road in front of the house. They are all around Scarlett’s school which is fun. We all still stop and watch the kangaroos when they are close, we really enjoy watching them.
Pubs! Yankalilla and Normanville both have a great pub too so Whitney and I are steadily reacquainting ourselves with the lunch menu. Making sure we get our date afternoon! We always do wedges and sweet & sour sauce plus a main. I pitch the schnitzel parmigiana but we often go with something that Whitney prefers as we are sharing :)
We have definitely had some unseasonably cold weather here and it has felt like a lot of errands and setup time has been needed. So it will be interesting to experience the next few weeks and see how it feels as we settle in and (hopefully) find a rhythm here. Below are a video and some pictures of our first week in South Australia.
