Day 24: Adelaide Beach Day, bike ride, hot hot hot

Today's plan is a bike ride to the beach, trying not to let the 100° temps knock us on our keisters. Dave has booked a pair of bikes with panniers for us to ride the next five days, and a pair of bikes for the day for Robbin and Dan. A bloke named Martin drops our bikes off at the hotel, adjusts them, outlines our best route in the map, all good! 

Did I show you this forecast? Hot!

In the AM we send Robbin and Dan to the Adelaide Oval and the bike pick-up location. Kathy and I ride over to meet them. Uh oh, the return time is 4PM, right in the middle of the 100° temps. We will have to cut short our beach time AND ride in the hottest part of the day. A couple phone calls to the owner Dan and we have an extension until the shop opens tomorrow at 9AM, when someone else will be there wanting to rent the bikes -- don't be late!

On the River Torrens linear park.

We hop on the River Torrens linear park that includes ten miles of paved ped/bike trail all the way to the beach. This is awesome! Nice scenery, some wetlands, a handful of wild birds including Australian ibis, a spoonbill, green parrots, pink cockatoo, and the magpies. We hear a tree full of something, maybe parrots, making lots of noise.

Fanciful boats in the river, like the paper boats that Curious George makes.

They even have black swans here. 

We've seen some magpies in the Melbourne botanical gardens, but none as wild seeming as these. There are half a dozen or more in a tree, all singing, and it really sounds more sentient than your typical birdsong. Very interesting. Along the path I stop to photograph a magpie. It hops to look squarely at me, watches me for a minute, and then hops over behind a tree so I cannot see it.  I roll up to be able to see it, then it hops away and hides behind another tree. Interesting behavior I have never seen in another bird. 

About to hide from me.

Odd diorama carved out of a synthetic termite mind. It is part of some kind of historic display in the linear park. 

Along the River Torrens.

Interesting sculpture along the way. 

Eventually we hit the coast, see the beach and ride North to Henley. The beach is wide and long, flat with very fine sand, the waves are non-existent in the morning. 

We set up on the beach a quarter mile from the Henley pier and basically alternate roasting on the sand and slowly chilling in the water. Delightful!  I have thought to bring my little folding umbrella, so I get a little bit of shade (clear blue sky, no clouds, powerful sun).

We have lunch at Estia, a Greek place on the main square in Henley. Delicious tatziki & bread, Greek salad and calamari. R&D have a grilled seafood platter that looks fabulous. Now back to the beach! 

Estia lunch, yum! 

After a couple more rounds of sunning and swimming we grab an ice cream, one more swim, and it's time to head home. 

The sun is so very very hot that I have to take extreme measures in order to nap without frying my skin to a crisp.

By now it's after 5PM and a breeze has picked up, generating a little bit of cooling power. We have a nice & easy ride home with multiple water breaks -- by the time we get home our remaining water bottles are actually hot. 

Dinner out at Adelaide Hot Pot Chinese restaurant. Yummy stir fry! 

Tomorrow we ride to the beach, turn south instead of north, and end up at Glenelg.

One interesting thing about directions here. When deciding which direction we are going I often look at the sun and its shadows, gauge the time, and figure direction. But the other day at noon I got all mixed up. Eventually I realized that the sun comes from the north at noon time, not from the south like at home. Yowza! This is taking an intuitive judgement about which way to go and making me think. That's so hard!