Heading downtown to the South Australian Museum ... by tram! Part One

The South Australian Museum ... great place to be on a hot day!

Ten thousand fascinating things ... plus fantastic air conditioning!

The T-Rex gatekeeper: welcome to the museum! But first ... gotta get there. So --

Catch the tram from Glenelg, over on the coast. You don't want to drive downtown!

Watch out for the tram. They come along every 10 minutes, but when you're waiting it seems sooo long.

Aha, here comes a tram! Too bad it's on the wrong track. It'll go down to the Bay -- the seashore -- and return...

...there it goes, heading down Jetty Road to Moseley Square, near the sea -- about a kilometer away. Patience!

A half hour later, here we are getting off the tram, on Adelaide's North Terrace --

Get ready for traffic! This is why you don't want to be driving downtown --

-- though, the buses are colorful. That's the Tour Downunder advertisement. And see where this bus is going?!

North Terrace is a visual feast of classical architecture --

-- as you walk down to the museum and art gallery, remember to look up.

There's also a wealth of statuary. This cavalry memorial is photogenic from any angle. 

The statue of Aphrodite was the first piece of public art
ever presented to the City of Adelaide ... considered scandalous in its day!

Matthew Flinders, RN. From 1801 to 1803 he commanded the first ship to
circumnavigate Australia.

Victorian era bronze statuary ... wish I'd taken notes!

Advance Australia ... just so you know where you are, right?

The National War Memorial ... the image hardly does it justice.

At last, the museum! And after that hike, the first priority is lunch...

The Baleen Cafe is right there in the museum frontage ...

Nice menu, good prices, and great a/c ... the Baleen Cafe at the museum.

Ooooh, smell that coffee! But we didn't come here just for lunch -- we wanted to see stuff, like...

Dinosaur skeletons: cryolophosaurus, an Antarctic dinosaur... 

...the largest ammonite ever discovered...

...amazing geology from all over the state and country...

...and the wonderful, exotic South Pacific collection. 

There's no better way to escape the heat than to spend a day at the museum ... the only challenge being, you have to get there first. There's a good bus service, but the tram is actually better, and "different." Adelaide has one of the last tram services left in the world. It's a pity they're disappearing, because they're a marvelous cross between bus and train.

The images in this post (and Part Two, tomorrow) are actually from several trips and visits to the museum. Some of the exhibits might have changed, but much doesn't -- can't -- change; and certainly the tram ride is pretty much the same no matter when you do it.

The new trams are very quiet. One has memories of "the old rattlers" which we rode for -- how many decades? Some of those trams were running for most of a century. They probably needed retiring, but they'll be missed. Here was the original, now antique tram --

--and not for nothing were they known as "rattlers!" The new trams are smooth, silent, and actually a pleasure to ride in, but they haven't the character of the old ones. Give 'em fifty years!

You can catch the tram from any part of the route from Glenelg onward. We usually find parking in Glenelg and watch for the next one at the tram stop at the top end of Jetty Road, Glenelg. From there, it must be something like twenty minutes to downtown, and then a hike down North Terrace. The State Library, museum, art gallery, University of Adelaide, Royal, Adelaide Hospital and the botanic gardens are all laid out in a neat row on the north side of the Terrace ... you can't get lost.

First: lunch at the Baleen Cafe: coffee, soup of the day or fish'n'chips, or a Greek salad perhaps, and cool off before heading onward and inward.

In tomorrow's post we'll go inside the museum: dinosaurs, geology, and coolness, while outside it's sizzling...