The road trip starts here

Well kind of. Adelaide is where we picked up our campervan to drive around Australia for the next 52 days. But, first we had a couple of days to look around Adelaide.

The flight in from Alice was a scary one. Up and down and side to side more than I think I'd ever had on a plane, we landed okay though. The city looked good from the sky and has a great coastline nearby. Once we settled in we wandered round to get our bearings. It's fairly easy in most places in Oz to get around as most are built on grid systems. If you head in the general direction of somewhere you'll get there no matter what road you take, mostly. We bought some food from the great market they have on ever few days, selling stuff off real cheap near the end of the day- all the garlic we bought there lasted us 2 months!
That evening Clive, who we met at Uluru, cooked us a great pasta meal for which we supplied the booze. And here we encounter one of the many oddities of Australia, buying alcohol. It's tricky, especially if you're on foot. We had to walk for about 20 minutes to the nearest booze shop and it turns out it wasn't a shop, it was a bar that had a takeaway counter near the entrance. Newsagents don't sell alcohol. Supermarkets don't sell alcohol(apart from the classic, and our new friends, Aldi). It's weird how restrictive it is compared to England but even weirder is the amount of driver-thru booze stores there are on main roads! You pull up, tell the guy what you want, he goes and gets it, you pay, you drive off. You do have the option to get your lazy ass out of the car but most people don't.
I liked Adelaide instantly. A great looking place that wasn't too big or too small, not too busy, not Perth-dead. Stuff was going on here but you could easily get away from it all in about 20mins at the beaches in the area. The weather was still crappy but it couldn't put a dampener on staying here. Right let's get the van!
In Perth we stayed near a Wickedcampers depot so we checked out the condition of the vans, all pretty new and in good nick. Of course ours was a heap, it had to be! Adelaide isn't a busy depot and all the vans looked a bit ragged but ours was the king. The Flamin Wicked. I thought it would be fairly cool be it turned out to be soo frickin cold at night due to the doors having large gaps in them. One side door was jammed shut, until it opened whilst I was driving up a hill! We could've, should've taken it back and swapped it. But as usual I thought we'd see it out.
We stayed around Adelaide for a few days though to get a decent look round the city before screwing it off into the country.
The best thing, and what we were looking forward to the most, is the freedom your own transport offers. Essential in a huge place like Australia that has a poor public transport system anyway. Also it was great to just drive up at caravan site, of which there are plenty, rather than thinking about which hostel we'd be in that night.
Glenelg that day. A sort of seaside resort for Adelaide and a nice looking place too. They are very proud of the fact that this was the point at which the first official non-convict immigrants landed in Australia. The old volunteers as the museum were very helpful and gave us a quick tour. There happened to be a cool surfing display on too, which was nice.
We parked our van, registration 'TIP190"- how apt, in the caravan park down the road and that turned out to be the best caravan park in Australia, as the awards proved. It was right next to the beach to, I'm sure it would be lovely in summer but not now! All down here from here then. As it goes though most caravan parks in Australia are very well set up. It's huge business and we ended up meeting loads of Australians taking years out to travel around their country, as well as plenty living out their retirement in different parks throughout the land.
Returning the cooking favor we took Clive out the next day in our supervan into the Adelaide hills. Superb stuff too and cracking views, to a point as the clouds were rolling in, back onto Adelaide. Adelaide is near to grape-growing-wine-drinking country, the Barossa Valley being the most famous. So the hills and country around it look brilliant and totally not what you think of when Australia springs to mind.
That evening was an excellent meal at a German pub in a German town settlement, Handorf. A nice little, and a bit touristy but good, town on the outskirts of wine regions and Adelaide.
We finished off our venture in Adelaide by visiting the museums and art gallery, aswell as walking by the river in the sunshine alongside the many black swans around. There are plenty of great looking Victorian buildings very reminiscent of England, obviously.
Every state in Australia has a different slogan on it's car registration plates, Western Australia(home of Perth) probably had something like "Western Australia - Don't bother". The Northern Territory plate may have read something like 'The Northern Territory - Hot and Red, Red Hot!". South Australia was the "Festival State". There's loads of festivals here, who'd of thought? We didn't see one but in a few days I didn't think we would.
I liked Adelaide a lot. Australians we met before coming here, some very set in their ways, told us not to expect much but it was definitely a nicer place to be than Perth and quite a good city in general. But we're off into the outback, sort of.
Right the real road trip begins. We head north for the Flinders Ranges the next day.

The bottom photo is somewhere on the way to Adelaide, probably near the Flinders ranges but who knows. The middle one is Adelaide from the hills and the top photo is the dreaded van.