Our friends Daryl and Lisa own a 1953 Holden that originally belonged to her dad. For our American friends, the Holden was an iconic Australian brand of cars built by General Motors.

They took us out on a cruise around the valley. No power steering, so the steering wheel is about the size of a hula hoop. Luckily, Daryl’s a big guy who is able to wrestle the Holden into submission.

Notice that the license plate is ”South Australia 2118.“ Shows you how old the car is and how few license plates had been issued back when this beauty rolled off the assembly line.

Social distancing was at a minimum because news of the Barossa Valley’s first Coronavirus cases didn’t break until a little later that night.

The first ten cases of coronavirus have just been detected in the Barossa Valley. And odd as this seems, all ten are American tourists. They’re quarantined in a very nice hotel where we occasionally have dinner.

We’d better start telling people we’re Canadian.

We have a roster of coffee shops and cafes that we frequent here in the Barossa. The Red Door and Darling’s in Tanunda. Fleur Social and Bean Addiction in Nuriootpa. And Hive here in Angaston. They’re all still open and we’re doing what we can to give them each a bit of support.

But when we’re back in Texas we need to drive more than 20 minutes to get to Aussie Grind, the only authentic Aussie coffee shop in Texas.

It’s a truism that everyone wants what they can’t have. Since we’re stranded her in the Barossa, we’ve started thinking about the Aussie iced coffees back in Texas.

This is Angie and Lui, the owners of Aussie Grind.

Looking forward to seeing you again in the not-too-distant future, guys. We just don’t quite know when that will be.

You know how you sometimes look up into the sky and you see a cloud and think to yourself That looks like a dog. You point it out to whoever you’re with and they look up at the same cloud and say, “How do you get a dog out of that? Looks like a ‘57 Chevy to me.”

It’s all a matter of perception. It’s not about what’s in the sky, it’s about what‘s in your head.

We’ll get back to that in a minute.

But first, there’s an old adage in the ad agency business that says, “It would be a great business if it weren’t for the clients.”

Let me give you an example. Early in my advertising career I worked in the Los Angeles office of one of the world’s largest international ad agencies. One of the accounts I worked on was Hughes AirWest. (Ten points if you even remember that great little airline.)

We created a new ad campaign to promote its flights to Mexico. It was a beautiful, romantic campaign. We were excited. The client was excited. We sent a photographer and an art director down to Mexico for several weeks to shoot tons of beautiful, romantic images. One series of photos showed an attractive young couple embracing under a feathery tropical waterfall. It looked very similar to the shot of Jamie and me and at the top of this blog item. (Well, sorta. Jamie’s doing her part of the job, but you’ll just have to imagine that I’m young, dark and handsome and that we’re under a waterfall.)

We used one of those waterfall photos in the campaign’s first ad. The account executive took the completed ad to the client for approval. He unveiled it with great fanfare and sat back expecting to be overwhelmed with kudos. Instead the client took one look at it and said, “I can’t see that guy’s hand, but I know exactly what it’s doing under the water. We’re never going to run that ad.”

It was kind of like looking up at that cloud I mentioned in the first paragraph. Where we saw something of beauty, he saw something dirty.

We were all dumbfounded, but he was adamant. So the ad never ran.

I swear to you that the model was doing nothing untoward with his hand.

And neither am I. My hand is holding the camera that took the selfie.

Even if Jamie’s face says otherwise.

Uh-oh. American Airlines just announced that it has cancelled all flights between Australia and the United States until at least May 8. So that means we will not be returning home as scheduled on April 28.

We’ll be fine hunkered down here in Angaston, but we wish all our friends and family the best of luck and best of health in the weeks to come.

Forget your Coronavirus hysteria. This is the real apocalypse. The Barossa Valley is getting its first McDonald’s.

I have a lot of McDonald’s connections. The very first McDonald’s was built on E Street in my hometown. The first TV commercial I ever did was for the Golden Arches. I have an odd tradition of eating a McDonald’s breakfast every time I’m at an airport. So I get it. I understand the odd allure of its godawful fast food.

I originally planned to spend my retirement years living on Maui. And then they built a CostCo down on Haleakala Hiway. It was no longer paradise.

That’s kind of how this feels.

Why must the real world intrude on my fantasies?

I don’t know why, but I always hit it off with medical doctors. For example, Jamie and I see the same doctor back in Texas, yet every time I come home from an appointment she asks, “What took you so long?”

“Bob and I were talking about our favorite gangster movies.”

”I can’t believe it,” she responds. “He’s all business during my appointments. I’m in and out in five minutes, but you’re there all afternoon.”

We used to share a California doctor who also became my pal. He and I were yakking it up in an examination room one day when his nurse opened the door and alerted him to a problem by saying, “I don’t mean to bother you, but patients are stacking up in the waiting room.”

”They’ll just have to wait,” he chastised her. “I’m talking to Jim.”

I mention this only because our neighbor here in Angaston, Dr John Rutter, is also my pal. He’s one of my all-time favorite people. He’s brilliant and funny and has led an amazing life that includes fifty years as Angaston’s town doctor. I love hanging out with him.

We went to dinner the other night and he asked, “Do you ever wear a tie?”

“No,“ I answered honestly. “I haven’t worn a tie in about thirty years.”

“Too bad,” he said. “I would have given you one of my Australian Medical Association ties. I have a closet full of them.”

Well, to be perfectly honest, I wanted to own something that had belonged to Dr John, and since I suspect that he has not seen fit to remember me in his will, I strong armed him into giving me one of those ties. And I will wear it proudly because it was once his.

(I’ll also wear it because I’ve heard it’s easier to get restaurant reservations when they think you’re a doctor and this tie might just get me into places that would have otherwise rejected me.)

You probably can’t see it in the above photo, but the tie features several elaborately-embroidered coats of arms. Here’s a close-up.

It’s a very odd coat of arms. It features two unicorns, each supporting a flag of some undetermined origin. Other features include a kangaroo holding the sun while perched atop what appears to be a knight’s helmet and visor. Anchoring the whole thing is a scroll that says, “Pro genere humano concordes.”

I never took Latin so I can only guess what that might mean.

“Pro” must be short for “professional.”

“Genere” looks like it might be the root word for “generic.”

“Humano” clearly refers to “human” in some way.

“Concordes” is undoubtedly a reference to the old Concorde jets.

Therefore, my best guess is that the English translation of the Australian Medical Association’s slogan is “We are generic professional human airplanes.”

Or maybe not.

I struggled through two years of high school French and had a one-armed French teacher who cringed every time I opened my mouth and dishonored his native tongue. I joined the French Club and was forced to wear a jaunty red beret in all club photos. I learned to how to say “I surrender” in French (“Je me rends”) any time I was confronted by someone who spoken German.

My smarter friends, on the other hand, took Latin and went on to have very rewarding careers as physicians and attorneys.

Our high school’s Latin teacher took some of the boys in his class on naked surfing trips to Mexico. He clearly liked naked teenage boys because he was eventually fired after being found passed out in a young student’s car following the ingestion of what legal authorities deemed an overdose of a controlled substance. I would ask him to do a more precise translation of “Pro genera humano concordes,” but he is unavailable for comment until he completes the rest of his sentence in the California state penal system.

His motto, which as far as I know was never written on a banner on the bottom of a coat of arms, may have been “Nec utilem.” I’ll let you track down your own Latin-English online translator for that one.

Thanks for the tie, Dr. John. I will wear it proudly despite its odd coat of arms.

This is either the most unfortunate art direction I’ve ever seen, or the most brilliant art direction I’ve ever seen. Either way, it got people talking.

I have been to Yass and I can assure you that McDonald’s would be considered one of its finer dining options.

But it’s the reason I spent time in Yass that really makes telling of this story worthwhile.

A lot of American kids travel during the gap between high school graduation and the first year of college. I’d bet that most of them go to Europe. But by the time I was a sophomore in high school, I had already decided that I would delay my travels until I graduated from college. And then instead of heading for Europe like everyone else, I took off for the Land Down Under.

I had more motivation than most student travelers. I worked as a Top 40 disc jockey on a local radio station during my last couple years of college. I thought it would be a lot of fun to work as a DJ in Australia, so I subscribed to the country’s weekly radio and advertising trade magazine just to get a sense of its radio industry.

One week that trade magazine ran an article about a small, regional radio station about 180 miles southwest of Sydney that had conducted a “Miss Yass” competition. The article showed a photo of the winner. She was a remarkably beautiful girl. Tall and lean with long, blonde hair. Terrific smile. Her name was Madeline.

I wrote a letter to Madeline in care of the radio station. I told her that it would be very sad if no one were there to greet me when I walked of that airplane in Sydney. A much better scenario, I suggested, would be for me to be greeted by a beautiful young Australian woman. Perhaps one who was tall and lean with long blonde hair. One with a terrific smile. One who was so personable that she had recently been named “Miss Yass.”

This could have gone two ways. She could have concluded that I was some kind of pervert, shredded the letter into tiny pieces, tossed the scraps in the trash, and reported me to immigration. Or, if I were lucky, she could have written back a very funny letter that said she’d like to get to know me and greet me upon my arrival.

I got lucky. She chose option number two. We started trading letters. It was not long before I had completely fallen in love with the beautiful, hilarious girl.

I fell more in love with each letter. I just knew in my heart that I would arrive in Australia, we would throw our arms around each other in the Sydney airport terminal, and live happily ever after.

SCREEEEEEEEECH.

That was the sound of this happy love story screeching to a sudden and unexpected stop.

A month or two before I graduated from college, letters suddenly stopped arriving. I kept writing, but received nothing in return. Eventually, I had no choice but to stop embarrassing myself. I was crushed.

Of course, I still traveled to Australia after graduation. I hitchhiked from north to south and east to west and back again and eventually decided that I had already traveled halfway around the world and had nothing to lose so I hitchhiked to Yass, walked to Madeline’s address, and knocked on the door.

Her father answered the door. I explained who I was. A huge smile creased his face. He greeted me like a long lost son and invited me into his home. I, of course, still held out hope that Madeline would be there.

“Madeline got married,” he told me. “They moved about thirty miles away and had a baby.”

That was not what I had wanted to hear.

“But please stay with us,” he said. “Spend a few days. Rest up from your hitchhiking. Then go over to Madeline’s new home and surprise her. She’ll be so excited to see you.”

Hmmmm, I thought. She has a new husband. She has a baby. I’m not sure that any of them will be all that eager to see me.

Nevertheless, I spent a few days with her parents. They were wonderful people. They showed me around the area. They fed me. They let me sleep in Madeline’s bed. (I don’t think I’m giving anything away here, but it proved to be the only time I slept in Madeline’s bed. If you know what I mean.)

In the end, I took their advice. I bid them a fond farewell early one morning and hitchhiked thirty miles down the road to the new home of Madeline and her new husband and their new baby.

To surprise them.

What the hell was I thinking? What the hell were her parents thinking?

It was the most uncomfortable afternoon of my life. Turns out Madeline’s husband didn’t know I existed. She had been going out with him the entire time we had corresponded. My conversation with her was awkward enough, but we freakin’ pegged the needle on the awkwardometer when her husband came home for lunch and found me sitting in his kitchen with his wife.

She took him into another room where they had a hushed but clearly angry conversation. I’m pretty sure the word awkward may have been appropriate in that room, too. He stormed out without saying goodbye and slammed the door behind him as he left. She came back into the kitchen and quietly said, “My husband has decided to have lunch in town.”

Madeline and I made labored small talk for a few minutes and then I looked at my watch and with forced surprise said, “Oh, my, look at the time. I can’t believe it’s this late. I really need to get down to the American embassy in Canberra before nightfall. I’d better leave now.”

I’m sure it sounded like nonsense because it was nonsense. I just wanted to get out of Madeline’s house before her husband came home again. I’m sure Madeline also wanted me out of her house before her husband came home again.

Oh, well. Didn’t matter to me. I didn’t really want to sleep with her.

My ass.

Or to take us back to the photo at the top of this story, Myass.

Or in American, “It’s nice. Real nice.” A fringe of Cook pines run along the rim of a red and white cliff that tumbles down to the edge of the ocean. Noarlunga has an absolutely beautiful beach that’s empty except for just a few bus loads of kids on the sand and in the water.

It was about eleven a.m. on a school day and we couldn’t figure out why so many kids were on the beach instead of in school. So we asked an adult who seemed to be in charge. “It’s beach safety day,” she said. “We bring all the kids in year five, six and seven.”

Pretty noice classroom.

Nice. I meant a pretty nice classroom.