Monday 7th November
The day started with the usual school work. We have been discussing the various options we have to sell our van and the Pajero. We have advertised in an Aussie Caravan magazine and also on Trade Me. We have also emailed several caravan dealers here in Adelaide. We decided to visit some of the dealers to try and judge interest and get some prices.
There are at least a dozen caravan yards in Adelaide, spread out all over the city. We visited 2 or 3 in one general area and a couple of them are interested, so that is good. One option they all offer is to sell on consignment; basically they sell on our behalf, but we only want to go down that line if we have to.
As a result of our visits we are going to call in at a couple of them on the way up to Gawler and the Barossa Valley on Saturday, to get a firm price. After doing the rounds of the caravan yards we headed into Port Adelaide shopping centre for a look around and a bit of essential shopping.
Port Adelaide is a suburb of Adelaide itself, and is based around naturally enough, the Port area. It has a lot of character with lots of old stone ware house buildings and of course an old stone pub on almost every corner.
Tuesday 8th November
Port Adelaide is the home for among other things, the Australian National Railway Museum, An Aviation Museum, and a Maritime Museum. After school work was finished we decided to visit first of all the Railway Museum, and then because it was right next door, we would also take in the Aviation Museum.
The Railway Museum was absolutely amazing. It was all displayed in a huge shed, with about a dozen beautifully restored old steam engines on display, as well as 3 or 4 diesels. Each one of them had played a significant part in the history of the Australian Railways, like the first Ghan, to go from Adelaide to Darwin, and the first train to cross the Nullabor Plain. Some of the steam engines were huge.
As well as the engines, there were also several carriages, like the dining car used on the Old Ghan line, and sleeper carriages from the same time. Besides the trains and carriages there was also a lot of the associated paraphernalia that goes with trains, including signal boxes stations and platforms. There was also a miniature train which took us for a ride right around the entire complex.
One of the interesting facts about the history of Australian Railways, is that in the early years, each state had its own gauge. For the less informed, that is the width between the tracks, so when the lines gradually extended out and met at the various state borders, oops, they didn’t match up. Bugger.
To overcome this they had to establish special railway stations near the borders where the trains would stop, and everything had to be off loaded from one train and then on loaded on to the next. This of course meant that moving freight by railway was not very efficient. There were three different gauges in existence, and after a few years they finally managed to agree on a standard gauge. I’ll bet there were a few interesting discussions on which states were going to have to change.
From the Railway Museum, we wandered a short distance along the street to the Aviation Museum. This was not a big museum compared to some of the others we had seen, but did have some classic planes on display.
Among them a Canberra Bomber, a Spitfire, and a small home built aeroplane that an Adelaide man by the name of Jon Johanson, had built and then flown around the world three times,
as well as flying to and landing at Antarctica, and flying over the North Pole.
They also had a couple of interactive displays, and a full size Aerocommander aeroplane that you could sit in and play with all the controls. They also had lots of scale models to admire.
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