easter shopping saturday with unexpected kites

Can you guess what we did today?

Everything started out the same as usual... Technically I broke my record for getting downstairs just as Ma was arriving, but literally only by about two minutes.

The supermarket portion of the morning was fairly standard... completely coincidentally and not because of the public holiday, I discovered at the end of the week that I'd run out of a number of different things, or didn't have things in the cupboard that I thought I did... so we ended up with a fuller trolley than usual.

Which didn't help when we got the other new check-out boy who cannot pack a bag to save his young life. I think Ma possibly traumatised him though... since she doesn't tend to suffer bad bag packers particularly well.

When we got back here there was much unpacking and filling of cupboards.

Beyond that we didn't have any plans for the day but while Ma was looking at part of the paper she happened to notice that the Adelaide International Kite Festival was on again this weekend (not really all that surprising, since I think it's usually been on over the Easter weekend, at least for the last few years).

So I dug out my Angels Play kite and grabbed my camera and we headed off down to Semaphore.

The Kite Festival is often a crapshoot... some years there's plenty of wind and the sky is full of colour, other years the kites just don't seem to want to stay in the air. Unfortunately this was much more the former than the latter. And as you can see from the photos, it was fairly grey when we first got there, although the clouds did break up somewhat later.

From a spectator perspective it also works better when the wind is going from left to right along the beach. Otherwise you just tend to see the kites from the wrong perspective.

It was also a shame because there seemed to be a whole bunch of new kites this year.

I always find that the music they have blaring along the jetty is way too loud... but then my default opinion is that any public address system should be turned down by half and everyone would be better off. And then there's also the prattle of the announcements/announcer which never gets any better.

Because the wind wasn't particularly strong we seemed to spend as much time waiting for the kites to get up in the air as we did watching them while they were up.

The public side of the beach was actually doing pretty well, kite-wise... but then they're just trying to get small individual kites in the air rather than the nylon behemoths that the professionals were dealing with.

Eventually we decided to wander up Jetty Road, maybe get some lunch and see if the wind picked up at all.

I do have to say though that Semaphore's Jetty Road isn't really all that exciting or conducive to wandering, so essentially we only checked out one store and that was more because it was there than anything else.

We'd decided to grab some fish and chips (well, in my case a burger), but when we stopped off at the fish and chip shop it turned out that the wait for food was about 40 minutes... which was definitely more to do with the crowds than the relative quality of the food.

But we decided that forty minutes was way too long to wait, plus it didn't look like the wind was going improve that much, so we decided to head along the coast until we found somewhere else to eat.

We ended up down at Grange... more due to the fact it was the first place that I knew there was a fish and chip shop rather than anything else.

Although we didn't got to the same shop we've been to before... it used to be really good, but the few times we've been recently it's been kind of dodgy, fortunately there's another shop one block over, so we went there instead.

Turned out to be a decent idea. The chips were pretty good and although I keep swearing off burgers as a food idea, one of the couple of exceptions is a good chip shop burger... there's nothing fancy or pretentious about them, and are usually pretty damn tasty. And this one was no exception.

We drove around the corner and found a bench to sit on right by the beach, which was very nice.

Once we were done with lunch I grabbed the kite out of the car and spent the required week and a half putting it together (actually it wasn't that bad, but it's been a while since I did it and was convinced that it was busted) before we headed down onto the beach.

Unfortunately there still wasn't all that much wind around, and while I got my kite up in the air for a while, it wasn't long before it was taking all my effort to keep it off the sand, so at that point I called it quits and we headed back home again.

So definitely not how I was expecting to spend the day, but as Ma said on the way home, it was nice to get out in the fresh air... and it wasn't especially too hot or too cold... although it could have been windier.

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