Big sky

Hello Adelaide. And hello bluer than blue skies, glorious sunshine and a balmy breeze. When clouds do appear they're like something out of The Simpsons, all perfect little contours and uniformly white and fluffy. Once you get some height, like here on the flanks of Mount Lofty in the Adelaide Hills, you realise that Adelaide goes on for miles and miles and miles.

Most people live in bungalows and have a fair patch of garden, and without too many barriers to stop it the city has spread out a long way. I'm staying with the my old friend Alison's brother Mike Jones and his wife Moyra, plus Jack the border collie and Bob the cat. 

Jack is a maniac for running round the house and you can send him off by throwing one of his toys into the corner of the garden. Jack comes with us to the beach on my first afternoon and we all run into the sea. The garden seems to provide an abundance of fresh produce. At breakfast my toast is spread with home grown apricot jam, freshly harvested pumpkin is roasted for a salad and tomato and basil picked from the garden is made into soup. I'm in fruit and veg heaven.

Mike and Moyra live in West Croydon, on the north west side of Adelaide. I love the house's high ceilings, period features and furnishings, most of which are designed by Moyra, who founded the Surface Art/Essaye brand of clothing and textiles. The business is run from a spacious corrugated iron shed at the end of the garden. At the moment they're dealing with winter orders so tables are piled high with covetable clothing and bolts of richly patterned fabric.

The neighbourhood is leafy and low-key but there's a weekend buzz around the parade of cool cafes and retro stores of Queen Street in nearby Croydon. Mike is working part time for a local bakery and cafe, Red Door, where there's a painting of him on one of the walls. It's not a fabulous likeness but it adds a splash of colour to the interior. 

Outside, the original wall advertisements have been painstakingly recreated. I have a veggie roll there not long after arriving and another bit of tooth falls out. Cue more dental cement from the repair kit. I think it's cracks in my teeth being compromised by the pressure in an airborne plane because it's only happened immediately after a flight. I'll end up with dentures at this rate. 

There's a trend in some neighbourhoods, and this is one, of decorating telegraph poles. They're called stobies (at first I thought Mike was saying stovies, which is a type of Scottish mashed potato dish). I find dozens around the streets of Croydon. In fact, I go a bit stobie mad screeching to a half and whipping out the camera if I see one. Be warned, there will be slide shows.

My first day trip with Mike and Moyra is to McLaren Vale, a wine region south of Adelaide. The yellow gold rolling hills remind me of Tuscany. We visit the Jones's favourite winery, Kays Brothers where the friendly chaps at the cellar door happily chat through the gloom of a sudden power cut. After a lovely lunch in the shade we drive to the nearest beach, Wallunga, and run into the sea. We do a lot of this, it being too hot to hang around on the beach. I climb to one of the clifftop viewing points behind the beach to get a proper eyeful of the vibrant blues of the ocean and the sky. 

On my first weekend Mike also drives me up Into the Adelaide Hills, to have a look at the view, take a short hike in the foothills of Mount Lofty and see what wildlife we can see. I realise what I think are Kookaburras are actually Australian Magpies. They don't laugh but they do make a sound like R2D2. 

We are fortunate enough to hit the Old Bullock Track at exactly the right time for Koala siestas. We lose count of the number we see perched in the treetops dozing. One or two lazily look down at us when we make a noise, then just as lazily and disdainfully look away, returning to their slumbers. Apparently they're not high on eucalyptus, it's just that the leaves are a bugger to digest so all their energy goes into that, which is why they need all those power naps.

The Adelaide Hills also have winemaking, a town called Stirling (where I studied in Scotland) and Australian's most German town, Hahndorf. It must be beer o'clock.