Last weekend, I jumped into the passenger seat of my friend’s car to make the eight-hour drive across the South Australian border to see as much of Adelaide as we could squeeze into a couple of days.
Our trip was motivated by a singular purpose: the AFL hosted all nine games for the week out of Adelaide in a festival of football called Gather Round.
It wasn’t my first time travelling to watch footy and it wasn’t even my first time watching Hawthorn at Adelaide Oval, but it was my first time going to an event of this nature and I’m pleased to say it was an absolute blast!
Here are my five highlights from the weekend.
5. Autumn leaves
Road tripping through Australia usually doesn’t offer you a particularly exciting variety of landscape as you drive through the countryside. The route from Melbourne to Adelaide is not very visually appealing (apart from the Big Koala). Instead, it’s many hours spent driving past similar looking fields.
When we finally pulled into Hahndorf, the German village in the Adelaide Hills where we were staying, we were greeted by a beautiful row of trees dressed in reds, oranges and yellows for autumn. I didn’t expect the leaves to be falling this early and after the many hours of driving had blurred together, the red leaves were a wonderful welcome surprise.
4. The inflatable Sherrin
During our meandering around Adelaide, we discovered that the AFL had installed a giant inflatable Sherrin football in the middle of Adelaide’s Rundle Mall. So silly and yet so fun!
It was really exciting that wherever we went in Adelaide, we saw signs, posters or gigantic footballs to celebrate Gather Round.
3. Monarto Safari Park
We had one spare morning sans football and we chose to spend it hanging out with the animals at Monarto Safari Park.
At Monarto, you jump on a bus and drive through all the large animal enclosures instead of walking around like at a zoo. It’s the largest safari park outside of Africa. My favourite animals were the inquisitive meerkats and the energetic Tasmanian devils.
2. Bakeries
When I found out that Adelaide had several 24-hour bakeries, I knew that it was a city of culture. Over the weekend, I visited as many bakeries as humanly possible: on the drive there, in Hahndorf and in Adelaide.
I did make it to one of the elusive 24-hour ones, Café de Vili’s, which did an excellent sausage roll. The German Cake Shop up in Hahndorf had wonderful warmed up pretzels and bee sting cake (although the owner is about to retire so I will sadly never eat there again). And Café 1813 did fantastic pancakes.
1. Watching Hawthorn play at Adelaide Oval
The whole purpose of my visit to Adelaide was for football so, obviously, the number one highlight was getting to see Hawthorn play at Adelaide Oval.
Travelling for football might sound like a fanatical thing to do, but I did keep in mind I’ve also travelled for theatre. There’s something special about making a fun weekend out of something you really love and going the distance to make it happen.
Adelaide Oval is a great venue for football. I loved watching the sunset glow as the twilight game progressed and the planes flying over the hill became blinking white dots in the sky.
Best of all, tomato sauce was free. The MCG could learn something from that.