Adelaide Hills: No, Not those Hills...But Close

Spencer Pratt and LC were no where to be found, but the Adelaide Hills are certainly the playground for many wealthy Aussies who want to eat fancy food and drink trendy wine.  We don't remember seeing any crystal shops, but we do remember being enchanted by the old German settlement of Hahndorf and blowing a huge wad on one hell of a lunch in an old mill turned fancy-pants winery/restaurant.  Hahndorf, and other small surrounding towns, had, as you might expect, a glutton of tasty bakeries.  Caramel slices, vanilla slices, danishes, and everything in between were enjoyed in vast quantities.  Wine, good food, and money to spend also attract things like boutique shops, fancy-shmancy artisan cheese, and handmade chocolates.  A tremendous chocolate shop/bakery served us the best drinking chocolate and the best caramel slice we'd ever had, making our sit there one of our best sweet treat breaks of the trip, and Woodside Cheese Wrights in Woodside made Annette a believer in all things goat cheese.

We tried a few wines we liked, though we struggled to find credence to some of the more snooty claims made on the tasting sheets.  While we learned a thing or two about wine, we mainly discovered that we are happy to be casual wine drinkers, as opposed to the type of people who comfortably discuss oaky notes and types of grass near the vineyard.  We know when we like a wine or when we don't.  And we know when a wine does something unusual and new and exciting to our tongues.  But beyond that we really can't justify pretending to taste things that no human could taste, or putting our pinky fingers in the air while decrying any bottle below $75.  (Actually, just the opposite happened a few days later when we tried a $13 bottle of wine--that's cheap in Australia--from a small wine maker from the Coonwrara region and loved it.)

The Adelaide Hills also taught us that while it is always fun to peak into the lives of the wealthy and bored, the best things in life, while not always free, are not always the most expensive either.  A small German style bakery in the quaint town of Lobethal (aptly named the Lobethal Bakery) provided us with some of the tastiest treats we'd had in a long while, but charged very little compared to most of the rest of Australia (have we mentioned how expensive the country is yet??).  Half a dozen cute towns, one amazing lunch, several wineries, the better part of two days, and half a tank of gas later, we drove down out of The Hills in search of more food and small town adventures along the Southern coast of OZ and the infamous Great Ocean Road, where food would take a backseat to impressive scenery and wildlife!

 Notes:

We did do a few things in the Adelaide Hills that weren't gastro-related...

Our quick stop at a wooden toy workshop brought back childhood memories of some of our favorite toys, like wooden ducks and penguins on sticks that you can push around to make their feet flap against the floor and wooden trains and trucks.  The workshop/toy store also had one of the more tasteful giant roadside attractions that we saw in Oz.

Another joy was the National Motor Museum in a small town called Birdwood.  The museum could have been a sterile homage to the automobile, interesting only to auto enthusiasts.  Instead, it provided thoughtful exhibitions and displays on everything from humans-and-their-trusty-auto stories to the future of the automobile in a world negatively affected by gas burning vehicles.  The museum had an extensive old and current car collection, with some really beautiful machines.  But the most interesting parts were the stories of how cars and the people that drove them helped shape living in the Outback.  An awesome set of lamb burgers cooked on the museum's outdoor BBQ put an emphatic exclamation point on the end of our time in The Hills, and the focus back on food!