It's all chronicled over there in the Travelogues, but in the interests of balancing the text here against the contents of the navigation bar, we need a bit of content don't we?
Madam decided she wanted to go to Adelaide back in November 2008, and with a bit under a week pencilled in the first question was where we wanted to go. You can't, after all, do the whole state in a week, can you?
Given a taste for Riesling it seemed logical to spend most of the time in the Clare Valley, with an overnight stop in the Barossa on the way back to Adelaide, and a weekend there before flying back.
The Clare Valley bit was based on the assumption we probably wouldn't be back, so we might as well try to do the lot while we were there. The Barossa, on the other hand, is the sort of place where you could probably spend a month…
Consultations with Mr Halliday's tome and other resources produced an itinerary that involved an overnight in Adelaide, Melbourne Cup Day in and around Auburn, our base at the southern end of the valley, a day working each side of the Great North Road, back to the Barossa on the Friday and thence to Adelaide to hand back the hire car before noon. Simple enough.
Cup Day in the Clare involved lunch at the pub in Auburn, and visits to Taylors and the township of Mintaro, which was, unsurprisingly, race affected.
We were booked in for lunch at Skillogalee on the Thursday, so that was the designated day for the likes of Jim Barry, Neagles Rock, Mitchell, Killikanoon, Olssen of Watervale and Crabtree, while Wednesday's trip around the east side of the highway took us to Knappstein, Leasingham, Kirrihill, Paulett and Pikes in the Polish Hill River subregion, and Reillys at Mintaro before the return to base in Auburn.
With a morning en route between Auburn and the Barossa, a lunch at Maggie Beer's and an afternoon for tasting I wasn't going to be looking at many options, but Rockford was one, Seppeltsfield was definitely another and I pencilled in Thorn-Clarke as a third if time permitted.
As it turned out, it did, and while we've barely touched the surface as far as the Barossa is concerned there's definitely a case for going back, isn't there?