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This is not a strict rule by any means, but it is always my goal to have some kind of theme to the three photos I included in each of my Daily Lunch Updates (DLUs). Sometimes it's obvious; a lot of times it's obscure and not very easy to identify.
For instance, the three shots in today's entry, there's actually a quite obvious commonality—but you'd have to click on them to view them on Flickr, and see their captions and tags, to see what it is: they're all from Shobhit's and my 2020 trip to Australia. It's even more specific than that, actually: they're all from the South Australia leg of the trip. The beach shot at the top is the last of the "DLU shots" I still had pending from the 2020 visit to Kangaroo Island; the middle shot, below, is from Adelaide Botanic Garden and even more specifically in its Bicentennial Conservatory; and the bottom shot is one of several "DLU shots" I still have pending from our day trip to Warrawong Wildlife Sanctuary in the Adelaide Hills.
I keep a massive backlog of photos I have tagged "dlunused" ("DLU" + "unused") for use as potential future DLU photos, and this is something I've done for a good 15 years or more. I don't even remember how long; functionally it feels like forever. Whenever I use one, I delete the "dlunused" tag and replace it with "dlused," to prevent myself from ever using the same photo twice.
I used to run out of them in between photogenic events easily, but for several years now, the backlog has been so long I could never keep up. I'd say the biggest contributor to increasing the massive backlog was our spectacular 2018 trip to Yellowstone National Park. I still have 190 photos from that trip that are tagged "dlunused." (I've used 150 of them.)
So how about Australia 2020, then? For that one, after today, I'll still have 11 "Australia+dlunused" photos pending. I have far fewer shots from that one left to use. (I've used 164 of them.)
Side note: this is really making me realize something. If I had to choose one vacation I've taken to date that was my favorite, I might have to choose Yellowstone National Park. There is some irony to this, given how my favorite places to visit as a rule are cities, and this was a national park in the country's least-populated state. And I would still use "spectacular" to describe the 2020 trip to Australia, but nothing really compares to the awe and reverence I had, not just overall, but for so many distinctly different things at Yellowstone. I cannot say enough good things about that place, it's so incredible. And the massive amount of photos I have of that trip (469 shots over six days, averaging 78 per day; compare to 1,044 photos over 14 days for Australia 2020, averaging 75 per day), but particularly
DLU-worthy photos from Yellowstone, which are far greater in number than from any other trip, is a big indicator of how much I loved that particular vacation.
Anyway. All of this is on my mind because we had some further email exchanges with Uncle David and Mary Ann last night. Evenings are a good time for email exchanges between us and them, as when it's evening here, it's afternoon there; when it's morning here, it's the middle of the night there.
I was looking up hotel options in the Adelaide CBD for the three nights we stay in the city, narrowing it to within half a mile of the Adelaide Railway Station. And when I started talking to Shobhit about distances between the station and the hotel and where most of the venues for the Adelaide Fringe Festival are, he shocked the shit out of me by suggesting we just rent a car. This after he had a serious conniption fit about my transferring $1,500 from savings to checking to cover airfare we already booked—now he was suggesting we add an arguably unnecessary and guaranteed significant expense. Sometimes, I swear to god, it's like I'm living wit a schizophrenic person.
But, because as a rule I am far less uptight about this stuff, I did not take a huge amount of convincing, and we looked up car rental prices and found them workable. Granted, those listed prices did not include whatever insurance requirements they'd have, which could very well be very different in Australia. Also, I would prefer not to drive in Australia where they're on the other side of the street; I'm way too nervous about making a wild mistake. Shobhit didn't seem all that concerned about it, and he did have a point that it could potentially make things a lot easier on all of us: we could go pick
them up at their house on the way to Kangaroo Island instead of them needing to pick us up at the airport; we could get a car large enough that we could fit all of our luggage in addition to the four of us; and we could more readily drive at night if we needed to, even though we probably wouldn't need to. Also, it started to sink in that the $500 we have Uncle David to cover some of the expenses they had paid for us in 2020 (he had refused to give us a hard number) was likely embarrassingly too little, at least based on the $620 AUD estimate for vehicle + four people on the SeaLink Ferry to Kangaroo Island, which we had no idea was so expensive. The fact that inflation is an issue around the world right now and this was likely cheaper in 2020 doesn't change that; the cash we gave them probably doesn't cover much more than the ferry alone, and they paid for a
lot of other stuff last time.
So, I sent an email last night asking them to hold off on booking the ferry, laying out basically all these arguments. And about an hour later, Mary Ann replied with an email that basically laid out why she thought our renting a car was a bad idea—not least of which was the notion that she is, apparently, a bit of a control freak and prefers to be the driver rather than a passenger. She did even say this, specifically:
I’m a nervous passenger and a bit of a control freak – you can see where this is going!
The most amusing part of the email, though, was this:
My experiences of US people driving in Sth Aust have been pretty much only with David; Carl [his dad, my maternal grandfather]
seemed to have it pretty much under control when he and Alice [his mom, my grandma]
came to visit back in the 1980s….however there have been times when I’m pretty sure David was trying to wipe me off the map and now even more so with his impaired eyesight. Consequently I drive most of the time though David will drive on back streets if he absolutely needs to get somewhere and I’m not around.
She then proceeded to tell a horror story of seeing a man have to kill an injured wallaby with a knife on the road, because both wallabies and kangaroo have no concept of the dangers of cars and frequently jump in front of them at night. And, even more broadly:
so many stories about people hitting a ‘roo and having it come through the front windscreen, landing in their lap and scratching them probably won’t go away any time soon. Um, no thank you! I wouldn't want to drive at night in kangaroo country either.
(Side note: you can find some kind of species of kangaroo virtually anywhere in Australia, but as South Australia was the only region in which we ventured outside the city at all—and there are no wild kangaroo inside the cities—that was the only place we really saw them.)
So, I replied that she persuaded me: scratch the car rental idea. Besides, she had also added:
we are pleased to use our car to get you around wherever you might like to go in Adelaide or elsewhere – that isn’t a problem. I'm good with this too, as it better guarantees the time we will spend together while we're in Adelaide, even if we stay at a hotel in the city.
We're kind of adamant about staying in a hotel this time, as they had not volunteered to offer their home for the 2020 trip; we asked if we could stay there—and they were incredibly generous and gracious about it, honestly more so than made us comfortable: they cleared out of their master bedroom for us, and slept in a much smaller temporary bed together out in their family room the three nights we stayed at their house. We were kind of like: yikes. They didn't appear to mind at all, to their credit, but we didn't like putting them out to that degree, and even though it'll be several miles from their house, sleeping in separate spaces will be more comfortable for all four of us, I think. Also, I really like the idea of staying closer to the city center of Adelaide, to experience it as a city visit the same way we did Sydney and Melbourne last time, and will again this time in Brisbane and Sydney.
And even though Adelaide is the smallest of Australia's whopping five major cities, there's something about its city planning that fascinates me more than that of any of the others: how its Central Business District is
entirely surrounded by 1,878 acres (that's nearly three square miles) of public parkland. I really love that, and would really like to explore more of it. If I lived there, I'd make a point of visiting each of the numbered parks, of which
there are forty.
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As for the rest of last night, it was entirely dedicated to preparing for having Cathryn and Lynne over for dinner tonight. Hosting people for dinner is quite the production at McQuilkin-Agarwal Manor, which has always been the case, but this is also the first time we've done it since before the pandemic. In fact, I'm not sure we've done it since 2018, a year in which we made a choice to do it regularly—we hosted dinners that year
six times, the final one of those being with Scott and his wife, plus Noah, his wife and one of their two kids, in late October of that year. Somehow we got out of the habit in 2019, and thought about getting back to it in 2020, until of course, you know what happened.
While Shobhit worked on food, I did a lot of cleaning. I took all the clutter off the glass "bar" that hangs away from the kitchen counter and over where the dining table is usually pushed against the wall; cleaned the fabric under it and wiped down the glass as well as many very dust-covered items. We put most, but not all, of that clutter back—a whole lot of which is now boxes of liquor purchased at the Duty Free Store on the Canadian border for which there is no space in our pantry—just organized a lot more nicely. I wiped down both the dining table and the coffee table with disinfectant as well. I did a bit of that on a couple of windowsills, and Shobhit wiped down cabinet doors in the kitchen while I vacuumed the condo. I also did a load of laundry for throw blankets that are on our couch and love seat.
Shobhit made practice samosas, so that's what we had for dinner, plus a set of corn bread muffins from a box of Jiffy mix Shobhit wanted to make. So that was a truly odd-bedfellows dinner: samosas and cornbread muffins. Shobhit added too much milk to the mix, but that just made them really moist, so it wasn't a bad thing. I had two samosas and two of the cornbread muffins. Shobhit likes to do practice samosas the day before to make sure he'll get re-practiced enough to keep them from falling apart in the deep-fry oil, but the ones he made last night were perfect.
So, that was it, really, last night: cooking and cleaning, punctuated by email communication with Uncle David and Mary Ann about our visit in six months. We're effectively ready for dinner tonight, save for the time Shobhit will spend after he gets home from work around 2:30, to cook up the samosas, make some bhaturas from a mix, and heat up all the other dishes that are now otherwise ready for consumption. I should get home around ninety minutes before people are set to arrive, which will give ample time to do things like, say, set the table, for six people.
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[posted 12:15 pm]
