31 Adelaide - Melbourne

27. Feb 2007

Adelaide is a nice city. Lots of parks and greenery, and I got my push bike out for the first time on my trip, to ride around in the city. 
 

I worked in Adelaide once – during a Festival of Arts. One of my jobs was as a stagehand in a one man theatre performance about the artist Van Gogh’s life. My job was to stand by in the wing with a (fake) gun in case the actor’s gun did not go off, in that final moment when Van Gogh shoots himself.
 

Tuesday it was off to the airport, Parafield, in North Adelaide, for the next leg down to Melbourne.
 

At midday I was ready to depart, and via the VFR reporting point the Dam, I flew VFR direct to Lilydale, I small airstrip north east of Melbourne.
 

I stayed at 5500 feet most of the way, and enjoyed the landscape below me. At first the relatively green hills out of Adelaide changing into barren, burnt bush land, and a couple of hundred miles out of Melbourne farmland laid out in neat squares. Australia is experiencing one of the worst droughts in memory, and it was obviously very dry below, with colours of all shades of brown, sandy soil.
 

All the dams I saw had very little water in them.
 

Coming closer to Melbourne, I duck under the controlled airspace at 3500 feet, and 20 miles out of Lilydale, I called up on the common frequency. I joined the circuit with several other aircraft on the right downwind to runway 18, and landed.
 

A good friend of mine, who also once worked for me in Denmark, Maurice was there with his family to greet me, and I will stay a few days with them, in their house in Healesville, about 60 kilometres north east of Melbourne.