Adelaide (sort of)

Since my trip to Syndey was a day-long marathon which allowed me to see nothing of Sydney except the Woollahra Council building (which was quite nice) and the inside of the Qantas Club at Sydney airport (also nice), I’ll skip it.

My weekend in Adelaide was quite pleasant indeed, although I didn’t spend any time in Adelaide. I jetted over on Friday afternoon, and was picked up by Scott (Mike’s brother) at the Adelaide airport. Scott and I drove the hour over to Goolwa and joined the rest of the gang (Mike & Kerry; Herbie and Roxy; Ryan and Jess; Sarah and Mark). The next three days were spent largely in sleeping, drinking beer, and shit talking, with the occasional jaunt to the beach, etc.

Friday night, we watched a DVD of music videos from the early 80s, including a number of Australian videos, I’d, of course, never seen. I was taken aback by just how incoherent many of the videos of that era were – the two which struck me as equally incomprehensible were Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart and Men at Work’s Land Down Under. Both good tunes, but their videos? Utter nonsense. We spent Sunday night watching The Wanderers, featuring a very young Ken Wahl and a very young Karen Allen. This “cult classic” (according to Mark) was ultimately judged to be a “shit movie” (largely due to the enigmatic actions of the universally feared “Duckie Boys”). Despite its U.S. origins, I’d never heard of this movie, and probably never will again.

The men folk made several outings in shifts for some deep sea fishing. I made it out for the Saturday session with Scott, Mark, and Herbie. This ended abruptly after Mark came down with an unavoidable case of fecal urgency. Unwilling to hang his bum over the side of the boat in a place affectionately referred to as “shark alley”, we headed back to shore, dropped off Mark and picked up Mike and headed back out. After another 4 hours on the water, I’d only pulled in one keeper, and after hooking a series of rejects in quick succession which forced me to wrestle with flopping fish on the floor of the boat amidst the swells, a sudden attack of motion sickness forced me to spend the next hour trying to recover my equilibrium. Nevertheless, the scenery was fantastic – cliffs, dolphins, etc., and I was quite happy to be on the water, having never done any blue water fishing. Over the course of the weekend, we collectively managed to hook enough fish to feed all of us Sunday night.