Hunter Valley to Forster

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Day 5

Hunter Valley, home to 100+ wineries. Big vineyards like Lindemans and Wyndham Estates and tons of boutique wineries you'd never see in canada.

We hit the tourist centre to try and get a tour. We're hit with 3 no's which is weird for a Wednesday according to the Info clerk. We'll we're a can-do couple, so we head out on our own.

I've wanted to see wineries like Lindeman's since we planned to hit wine country, so we strike out for theirs 1st. Lots of windy, dippy and pour roads, we arrove at Lindeman's. Before I go further, I must mention that we'd been a to big, elegant winery in Kelowna 2 years ago and had a fabulous tour. I had big expectations. We get a small cellar door (wineries will have these to do direct sales and wine tasting) with no tour.

SIGH.. gotta stop getting my hopes up.

We take a few pictures, don't buy anything and see what else we can run into.

There's a couple of cheese places here so we go to the 1st one we see. What a delight!! It's paired up with a Vineyard and has a great store. Locally made cheese and we're offered a good sample of them to taste. Surprisingly, cheddar tasted nothing like what we're used to. We buy some goodies and hit the winery next door.

We truck on and hit a few more places and then decide to drive to Wyndham, which is sort of out of the way. But a blessing because we come across Blue Tongue Breweries, which I had seen in a pamphlet earlier. We buy a mixed tasting plack of beer and a hat after a good talk with the two guys in the cellar door.

We keep on to Wyndham which I'd said earlier, is out of the way. It's no where near the throngs of vineyards we'd passed. In fact I'm sure we're lost until we see a big Wyndham 7km sign.

Driving down the driveway, we realize this is not an ordinary winery as we'd seen all morning. There's a concert dome being erected on the property, well established vineyards with firm grass between the rows of vines, and a presence unlike any we'd seen.

COming on a Wednesday, there's no one around. We enter the cellar door and are greeted by 2 attentive staff, who encourage us to look around and come see them when we wanted to do a tasting. We hadn't experienced this level of service yet this morning and are impressed. We have a look around at the trophy case of wines that had won awards in the past 4 years and head back to the counter for a tasting.

We go through some reds that we can buy back home and decide on 3 bottles. We learn that the vineyard is the oldest and pioneered the area and that the dome will house a concert on the weekend featuring bands like UB40 and MaxiPriest. Pretty damned cool and a good reason to end up at this vineyard.

So we decide not to stay another night in Hunter Valley and try to get lost as we head up the coast to find a place to park for the night. As we go through the caravan park guide, we decide on Forester and Happy Hallidays Caravan Park. We book a site and find the two ladies to be nice and chatty.

After we parked the caravan we headed back into the office to find the nearest grocery store. The one of the two ladies ends up as one of the owners who took a long north american tour a couple of years ago with her husband. About 2 months I think. We hear their tour over the next 40 minutes which has us missing closing time of the grocery. It was interesting to hear this ladies take on our country. They really liked it and wished that they had our Rocky Mountains. Her husband chimed in and agreed. If they had the mountains, they wouldn't have the water problem that they do.

This was interesting to me. As I had noticed some things in Sydney but not paid much attention. It wasn't until we got into smaller, real communities that we would truly learn of any real conditions of Australia.

We have bottle of white wine and eat the fresh cheeses that we had bought in Hunter Valley.

We crawl into bed early again and listen to the downpour that ensues on and off throughout the night

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