Glenelg: Fri 10th April – Sat 11th April
Accommodation: AirBnB link here
Thurs 9th April
The purpose of this trip was to attend the AFL Gather Round for 2025. We attended this event last year, with my sister Colleen and her husband David, and we all loved it so much we that we ventured back for the second event. Previously we stayed in a house in the coastal suburb of Glenelg but, this time, we were lucky to score an apartment right on the beach.
Mark and I flew down to Adelaide and arrived at Glenelg at around 3.30 pm. Colleen and David joined us after driving down from having a few days with other family in Mildura. Our accommodation was a lovely apartment that we had initially found on AirBnB but had eventually rented privately. It was a 2 bedroom and 2 bathroom place with the most stunning view out over Glenelg beach from the large lounge dining area and it had the most enormous wrap around balcony / terrace. The Saint Kilda football team were staying in the Oaks hotel, that was part of our apartment building, and the boys joked that we could’ve hosted a celebratory event for them, and their entourage, on the our terrace.
It was near 5.30 pm by the time we set out to find a venue for our aperitivo and we settled on The Pier Bar which was on the ground floor of our building and it offered a glorious view out over the water of St Vincents Gulf.
Dinner was booked for 6.30 pm at Luciano’s which was just a 5 min walk from our apartment and a venue Colleen and I had visited during last year’s Gather Round. It was a pleasant enough dining experience but not a patch on that from the previous year and Colleen and I wondered if the place had changed hands. I had used our enjoyment from last year to justify to Mark why we should have dinner here when he had mentioned that the restaurant only had a Google rating of 3.9. I now wonder that the rating was more correct than my memory or, maybe, the venue has indeed changed hands and suffered a decline. Anyway, if we come down to the Gather Round next year, I don’t think we’d be heading back to this place for dinner.
We were all quite tired after our day of travel and so headed back to the apartment for a relatively early night.
Fri 10th April
It was an absolutely glorious morning that greeted us for our first morning in Glenelg; blue sky, sunshine and no wind! The boys went for a bike ride, Colleen went to Pilates and I had a walk before we all met up for coffee at Coast, the cafe / restaurant just below our apartment.
There wasn’t much on the schedule for the morning so we all did our separate things before meeting for lunch back at Coast. They had a lunch special of a lobster roll and glass of sparkling which we all greatly enjoyed.
Our afternoon before the AFL was spent visiting the Botanical Gardens as there was an exhibition by the renowned American glass blowing artist, Dale Chihuly. This was a delightful afternoon spent wondering through the gardens locating the 16 different exhibits that were extraordinarily impressive. It was quite a coup for Adelaide to score this exhibit as his work is generally only on display in his home town of Seattle and, on occasion, in London. The other point to note was how beautiful the botanical gardens were; they’re worth a visit even without the exhibit and a wonderful escape from the heat of Adelaide city.
It was almost 5 pm by the time we left the gardens and we stopped off in Adelaide for a drink before heading down to oval to watch Collingwood v Swans. Sadly for us, the little pee wee bird I’d seen earlier in the day, cousin of the magpie, and had wondered if this was a bad open, proved to be correct.
