We arrived in South Australia on the 3rd November for a few weeks stay in Adelaide. Kerry joined up with us from London on the 8th but before that Chris and I managed to fit in a few things before her arrival.

<p>On the first morning we were woken up by loud music at about 10am- and going outside on our balcony discovered that there was a Christmas parade going on outside, so we saw lots of Children’s characters fly by on float after float before seeing Santa himself appear in the blazing sun! Quite strange but Alan... you'd have loved it! We also decided a tour of the Adelaide Oval and the Don Bradman collection which was very entertaining and visited the statue of the Don himself (he quickly became my second most respected cricket Don after Don Boniface!).

<p>Adelaide itself was a very chilled out city- and after Kerry arrived we spent most of our time in the park or Botanical Gardens just taking it easy. However, a big highlight came on our first weekend there as we visited a club only to find that Dan O'Connor- aka Ned Parker from Neighbours was doing a PA. Got to meet him, got a signed arm, heared of a few interesting storylines coming up and he even served me a drink... I think he was quite fond of me- just check the pictures out!!

<p>That weekend got better the following morning, as after a very early call back home to accept my player of the season award from St Mary’s CC, we headed out on a wine tour in the Barossa Valley to celebrate. We stopped off at a few interesting tourist spots on the way including a random meeting with the world’s largest rocking horse and a visit to a massive whispering wall which stretched across a river. Once the miscellaneous part of the trip was over we headed to Jacobs Creek winery for some wine tasting. From there we seemed to visit winery after winery, each one we visited I payed a little less attention to the 'meaning' of the wine!

<p>Our final week in Adelaide saw some more chilling out but we did find time to visit the Adelaide Zoo for some animaltastic fun (sorry!) and also caught the first day of South Australia V England- England’s last warm up game before the Ashes. It was good to see them hit a little form ready for the big days.

<p>We decided it would be cheaper (and more fun) to drive to Melbourne via the Great Ocean Road. So we hired a Toyota Corolla and headed out of South Australia heading towards the great Ocean Road which was to be a journey of just over 1,100km.