saturday with shopping and kites

Do you think you can guess what we did today?

Yeah, not really that difficult, is it...

But backtracking briefly...

This morning was fairly standard, although because yesterday was a holiday, I'd already tidied up and done the washing up, so I didn't really have anything to do this morning... which was nice.

Shopping was also about average... although, being the middle of the Easter holiday, the supermarket was a little chaotic...

Which couldn't have been more different from when we stopped off at the supermarket at the North Adelaide village to pick up a couple of other things I either forgot or couldn't get at our usual Saturday supermarket.

I fully expected that to be completely chaotic too... but it was essentially deserted... which was weird. I'm guessing everyone in North Adelaide either went shopping on Thursday or has gone away for Easter.

After I went through my fridge and cleared some room for shopping, we headed down to Semaphore (with a brief and ultimately pointless stop at Arndale) for the Adelaide International Kite Festival.

This is the first kite festival we've been since 2009... I think they cancelled the one in 2010, and we never saw anything advertising the 2011 one.

Unlike other years there wasn't a big tent from the Kite Shop full of kites to buy... in fact, I'm not sure that the Kite Shop is still operating... I know the one in the city closed... and the fact they weren't at the festival is pretty telling.

On the up side that did mean that Ma and I didn't spend money we didn't really need to spend on very pretty kites.

However, watching them fly the big stunt kites did make me wish I could have been flying my giant stunt kite that is pretty much just a wall decoration these days...

It was incredibly difficult to handle though... and using it around people would have terrified me.

There is something about the sound of those kites whizzing through the air that struck me with an extreme case of nostalgia and a sense memory of how it feels to get one of those big buggers into the air.

We both took kites with us though... I couldn't be bothered putting the big white Angels Play kite from 2009 up, so I took the little flame sled kite I bought at some point previous (the year before I think)... you know, just on the off-chance we wanted to fly something.

But we never did... partly because my knee has been playing up of late and neither my knee and kites nor my knee and sand have a great history... so I wanted to try and avoid walking on sand if I could.

Just standing on the jetty watching the kites and photographing everything with my giant telephoto lens was enough for me to be honest.

Have I mentioned how much I love that lens? Yes, I know... I mention it ever single time I use it.

The only thing I couldn't really do with that lens was get an overall shot of all the kites at once... but the close up shots I did manage to get totally make up for that.

When we first got there the sky was all grey and overcast, which did make for some great shots... or at least I think so... but then I like overcast beach photos.

But then at a certain point the sun started to come out... which was good... it made for a different range of photos, although I'd forgotten to take my hat with me, so, naturally I ended up a little bit sunburned...

Not badly, and mostly only on the parts of my face that I hadn't already put my face protector on... the very top of my hairline and parts of my scalp...

So after a little while soaking up the sun, we called it a day...

Then we stopped off at The Mill for some lunch...

Some very tasty, tasty lunch... steak and mushroom pie and the mother of all vanilla slices... not the best one I've ever had (the custard wasn't quite stiff enough and the icing was waaaaay too thick), but it wasn't bad.

And that was about it really... 265 photos and a very enjoyable afternoon!

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