A little wine, some dolphins and the Melbourne Cup

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After a week in Sydney with Di and Shawn, I decided it was time to take the honeymooners up the coast a bit, with a pit stop first in the Hunter Valley for some wine tasting. The Hunter Valley is about a 2 hour drive north and inland a bit from Sydney. It is a beautiful area, with somehting like over 70 wineries in this area. We did a day long bus tour with Rover Tours that was great. They picked us up from where we were staying at 9:30am and took us to 6 wineries, a cheese factory, an olive factory, a chocolate factory and a pub as the last stop before dropping us off at our cabin at 5:30pm. It seriously was a full on day of alot of wine drinking because each winery would give you on average 8 testers along with a bunch of history of the different wineries, grapes, etc. So we did actually learn alot too, it wasn't just all drinking! We stayed in a cabin at one of the caravan parks there, and I even let Shawn sleep with his wife while I slept in the bunks. Although we were still all basically in the same room. Guess some things never change...

After the day and night in the Hunter Valley, we headed over to Port Stephens which is about an hours drive east from there heading towards the coast. Port Stephens is a really beautiful area that Brett and I had been to last year that claims to have Australia's largest resident bottlenose dolphin population in the bays. We stayed another 3 nights here in a cabin at a caravan park that was a 2 minute walk to 2 different beaches. It was a great time to be here as it wasn't busy at all. The weather was beautiful the first day, but then a bit cloudy, but still nice and warm.

We did a bit of shopping (well Di did while I went along with her, while Shawn found a nice pub to sit in), a dolphin cruise where we did see alot of dolphins, and also made it to the local RSL club (which is kind of like a legion, but nicer...) to take in the Melbourne Cup. The Melbourne Cup is a huge horse race in Australia every year that basically shuts the country down for a few hours. People in Melbourne even get the day off for it, and around where we were stores all shut down for the afternoon to watch it. Everyone gets all dressed up with big hats and it gambles like crazy! Sorry no photos to go with it... Kinda forgot. Anyways, a few hours to watch the Melbourne Cup turned into a few more as we made friends with some local oldies at the table next to us, who liked to buy us a few rounds of champers (a.k.a. champagne). And after all three of us betting on probably 12 horses of the 20, none of us won anything!

After the 3 days up in Port Stephens, Di and Shawn flew down to Melbourne for 4 days, and then we met up again and they stayed 2 nights at that famous B&B down in Wollongong that is always a good spot to stay, then it was back up to Sydney for 2 last nights before my honeymooners headed home back to Canada. And next stop for me is Singapore to go see Brett finally who is almost done work. Yay!

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Photos

Shoal Bay in Port Stephens.
The beach in front of our campground.