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.

Sand Sculptures at Christies Beach - Part Two

Sand sculptures at Christies Beach -- late November, 2013 ... beautiful!

Christies Beach is also the perfect venue. For a start -- check out the beach. And the weather...
Note: the beach is empty. Imagine if this were Europe.Woo hoo!

It was also perfect boating or fishing weather ... loads of boaties were out, with a line in the water...

...but we were here for this: the Sand Sculpture Exhibition,
with the theme of "Under the Sea."

If you're wondering how the work is done -- read this!
Might even have a go myself...

Sand sculpture really is art, even if it's sadly temporary...

The work in progress. This artist is working on the "Santa Clause House, which unfortunately
wasn't finished till after we'd left...

...and this will give you an idea of the scale of these works. They're big.

Time for a dip, to cool off? The day was absolutely perfect. So --

A walrus ... sculpted in sand. This is so cool.

I was so impressed with the detailing in the sculptures. The artists came from Canada and Europe for
this event; Sandstorm Events stages them in many places...

Here's the flag carrier, displaying the "Under the Sea" theme...

Raptures of the Deep -- sculpted in sand. So pretty!

Perfect weather and beautiful sculpture came together to make this a terrific display -- and they were very lucky with the weather. Days before, November had been much more like September: inclement would be a kind way of putting it. But summer came to South Australia almost without warning, and it was a day for hats and sunblock! Here ... "for those who came in late" ... we're at Christies Beach, which is a metropolitan beach on the west side of Adelaide, which sprawls north-south along the east side of the Gulf St. Vincent. Okay, now you know where you are!

If you're wondering how sand sculpture is done, do take a moment to read the billboard, which explains the process. You might have to view the image at full size to be able to read -- but it's interesting.

The scents of frying sausages and onions were tantalizing, wafting along the foreshore from what we call a "sausage sizzle" ... a barbecue set up in a pergola, with lashings of all the food that's probably very bad for you, and smells so divine in the open air. They set up these barbecues to torment you. They do it deliberately ... also to raise money for charity and local groups.

So we had a fine time, took about three hundred pictures of which you're seeing a tiny fraction in these posts (but the right fraction), and then went for coffee to the Blu C Cafe, only about two hundred meters away ... which I didn't get a shot of, because we'd left the big cameras in the Millennium Possum, down on the waterfront. So -- Ma Google to the rescue here. Again. I did have my phone with me, though, and the two-year-old Samsung Galaxy has a 5MP camera built in. So long as you stay away from the digital zoom, which tends to turn images to soft, grainy crap, you can get very nice pictures. So, when the coffee arrived, how could I resist, especially when it looked like this:

Monjava cappuccino at the Blu C Cafe ... now, that's pretty! 

Oddly, though, the coffee wasn't startlingly good on the tongue: it's Monjava, which doesn't have that knockout richness we've come to demand, and expect (and before anyone says anything: it's some folks' favorite, so ... each to his own, right?). It was nice, though -- and the cafe is very pleasant, just a short walk up from the beach. So --

Tomorrow I'll share the "food-fight" which took place on the Saturday, about three days later. See you then!

Sand sculptures at Christies Beach - Part One

Sandstorm Events staged the sand sculpture competition at Christies Beach in December 2013 --

...and a few days later, the Beachside Food & Wine event, at the same venue. So --

After months of gray skies and drizzle, we lucked out with perfect weather ...

Calm blue ocean ... looking south toward Noarlunga and Aldinga, down the Gulf St. Vincent

It was hot, but not as hot as it would be a few days later, and we visited the sculptures
at mid-week, so beat the crowds.

A good time was had by all -- dogs too! and --

Just so you know where you are...!

After eons of chilly, drizzly, windy weather, at last, perfect weather just in time for the sand sculptures! Dave and I went along at mid-week, because we guessed (rightly) that the weekend food-fight, I mean fest, would bring in crowds in the tens of thousands. It did. But on Wednesday we had the place almost to ourselves and were able to stroll around, enjoy the art, the blue sky and calm ocean, and then go for coffee on the high street.

In fact, conditions were so superb, and the whole thing was so lovely, I'm going to cover this event in three posts because there's a lot to show and share. My favorite of the sculptures was the Octopus Garden, though I also have a fondness for that whale.

I guess I also need to dig out my pictures from the World Ice Art Championships in Fairbanks, for contrast! It was March, 1999, about ten below zero and the most amazing ice sculptures were lit in with fantastic colored lights. The only thing is, the photos are just that -- photos. They'll need scanning, and they won't have quite the integrity of digital shots. Still ... they're nice.

Back tomorrow with more; and I'll wrap this story on Friday with the food-fight. I mean fest. Well ... I was a bit of a fight, actually, and I'll tell that story in a few days