Food Fight at Christies Beach!

The Beachside Food & Wine Festival at Christies Beach draws crowds. Big ones...

This was a few days earlier ... not so crowded...

The weather was getting steadily hotter all that week.
Christies Beach looks like the perfect vacation spot.

A long-shot ... this guy was way out on the horizon, and headed out, not in.

The beach was the place to be: camel and pony rides! Dave had wanted to do this, but it was HOT
and the lines were long. So ... another time. 

Camels, green sea and sailing ships. Perhaps only in South Australia!

The One and All is a training ship, built up at North Haven, at Port Adelaide.

The sand sculptures were all finished by now, and on display...

Dave, and the Octopus Garden -- a few days before. Thank heavens we got all our arty pictures before
the food festival: on the day, the thing you saw most of was the back of the guy in front of you!

Sunday was HOT for the food festival itself, and one One and All was just one of many vessels offshore.

Jade soon put away the big camera and switched to the phone for pictures --

In this crush, the Samsung Galaxy camera was just as good! And --

-- the closer to the food you got, the harder it was to find a picture...

...or a place to sit, or get out of the sun.

Wow -- take the picture, quick! There's activity on the beach ... people, and all!

The weather for the Beachside Food & Wine Festival can be summed up in one word: HOT! It was almost the first really hot day of the season, and Christies Beach was hopping. The event usually draws a big crowd, apparently, and this year ... well, if we had to guess, we'd say the organizers were caught unawares.

The perfect weather plus the sand sculpture exhibition, organized by Sandstorm Events, about 15 whole meters away from the first of the food and wine, brought a lot more people than they appear to have expected. You could deduce this from the clues at hand, to quote Mr. Holmes, because ...

Well, no place to park, for a start. We wound up a kilometer away, up a hill. Not enough shade, by a long shot, especially in this kind of heat. Nowhere to sit! Many people (ourselves included) were standing to eat lunch, in the shade of our own hats. Take note, Festival Organizers: think through your parking and seating for the 2014 event!

The One and All was offshore ... she's a training ship, built at North Haven, on the Port River, in 1985 ... see her website right here. And she was only one of many vessels out on the water. You saw everything from kayaks to some of the big fishing charter boats. And on the beach itself, camels and ponies for the kids. And the big kids. Dave would have been on a camel, if the day hadn't been so hot, and the lines had been a tad shorter. The same entrepreneurs organize camel rides at Victor Harbor in the summer, too. Now, there's a thought...

The biggest challenge was the NOISE!!! Heaven alone knows who or what the live band was supposed to be, but they were so far over-amped, with loudspeakers every 20 meters along the waterfront, your whole body vibrated with the "music." Jade quickly plugged the ears with wet tissue, and it was absolutely bizarre: mostly deaf, body vibrating fiercely. Note to Festival Organizers: turn it down a  bit next year!

Dave got some very nice local wines (including a Moscato to die for), and we had Korean and Spanish food (spring roll, kebabs, paella), and Jamaican lime tea, which were nice. The food was along the lines of "ethnic fast food" -- interesting, gave you a chance to try something you wouldn't ordinarily have.

So Jade quickly put away the big camera and switched to the Samsung Galaxy's little 5MP camera, built right into the phone. All the longer shots you see in this post were done with the Fuji Finepix HS10; the last five images -- people; and that one shot of the beach -- are from the phone! Thy don't have quite the resolution of the "real" camara, but dang, it's handy to be able to take simple shots from the palm of your hand!

Will we do the event next year? Hmmm. Depends ... on the weather, the parking, and the band. Put it this way, if you're cruising half a mile away, looking desperately for anyplace to park the Millennium Possum, and the band sounds loud even from there -- keep right on cruisin' and go for coffee. You could do worse than The Boat Shed, at Hallett Cove, and we'll take you there in an upcoming post.