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Published: November 11th 2008
So let's get something really clear, the food aboard the train is really good! Not some frozen stuff that they microwave and plop in front of you, it's excellent restaurant quality with service to match. While you're enjoying dinner, they make your beds and after dinner last night, we were in bed by 10:30pm.
All things considered, we slept relatively well but we're going to have to do something about the rattling bathroom door. The day aboard the train starts early, by 7am you're up and awake whether you want to be or not. But we didn't come all the way here to sleep the month away so it's OK.
We've now left the lush green hills of the Blue Mountains and have truly entered the dry, arid landscape of the Australian Outback. This looks very much like Arizona or New Mexico, minus the cacti.
Our first stop is the small mining town of Broken Hill. It's close to the border between New South Wales and South Australia. It's home to the world's richest silver-lead-zinc ore. Broken Hill has also served as a backdrop to movies like Mad Max 2 and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. We spent
an hour roaming around the small downtown area and picked up some snacks at the local grocery store (not that we're not already being well fed or anything.)
Back on the train, our next stop is the city of Adelaide where some of our passengers will be leaving us while we pick up a new batch and swap out locomotives. We pulled in around 3pm and had a couple of hours to ourselves to go explore. We hopped in a cab and headed downtown. Adelaide, like Sydney, is very clean, with lots of green, open spaces. We strolled along the Torrens River and around the campus of University of Adelaide. If you look at a map it looks as though the city sits on the coast but downtown is actually 20km away from the coast so we didn't make it to the beach unfortunately. A pleasant surprise was that the city has free Wifi which came in very handy for navigating around using Kip's iPhone. One thing we could do without however are the flies. Tons of obnoxious flies down here, they're very bold and won't leave you alone. They seem to come out in force when the sun
is out. Time to invest in portable bug zappers!
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Ada
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Happy Birthday Frank!
They say it's your birthday.... HAPPY BIRTHDAY! :-) Although, I don't know if I'm a day late or early! LOL! I can't believe you're 10,000 miles away!! The train cabin is quaint... to say the least! It seems like cruising! I bet you get a chocolate on your pillow too! Did they push the beds together?! LOL! ;-p LOVE YA!