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Published: December 4th 2013
Ok, we haven’t written a blog for over a month so there will be two in rapid fire succession. One covering the things Shelagh and I have been up to on our own and one covering the exciting two weeks that our friends Katrina and Simon came to visit. And by exciting, I mean drinking. It was a sign of things to come when I picked them up at the airport at 10 am and took them home to shower, unpack etc. Within an hour Kat had opened the bottle of nice white Shelagh bought in a vineyard near Canberra and Simon had begun his investigation of Australian Craft beer. It happened to be the day of the Melbourne Cup – The race that stops a nation – so we headed out to meet Shelagh at a pub to watch the race. We got schooled up on the ins and outs of horse racing from our neighbours at the next table. This fully equipped us to make well-educated bets and we sent Shelagh and Simon to the bookie beside the pub. Shelagh because was the only one with any experience in this and Simon cuz, well, probably because he’s a boy.
The race itself takes approximately 3 minutes and was, well I’d hate to say anticlimactic…but anticlimactic, and none of us won anything! The day had started out grey but the weather had changed and it was a beautiful sunny day so we headed down to Circular Quay and the Opera House. We joined the thousands of well-heeled Melbourne Cup revelers drinking champers by the harbour. We felt so silly that we had forgotten to wear our 6 inch heels and fascinators!
We have previously mentioned the strange pub up the road from us. We saved the experience to have with Kat and Simon. It can’t even really be explained. A crazy man MC’s the whole experience, and by MC I mean yell indecipherable things and spray people with a water hose. Then they pull out a bucket of crabs and put them on special crab racing table and off they go. Luckily we have a video here for you. [youtube=
] There are other events as well and luckily we had not had quite enough to drink to inspire us to participate! I don’t imagine we’ll become regulars there but I’m sure as soon as my mom reads
this she’ll be begging us to take her when they come to visit!
A couple days later we packed up the car bright and early and headed to the Hunter Valley – the wine region inland from Sydney known for Semillons and Shiraz. On the theme of “everything in Australia is bloody expensive” we decided not to do an organized tasting tour because to hire a drive would have been about $400 for the day. Instead, I elected to stay sober and be our driver. Well, at 11 am as we entered the Hunter Valley (before any wineries) we were stopped in the first check stop of my life. The cop was initially quite brusque with me, particularly when I told her I wasn’t carrying my passport. However, in that weird way where we will never really understand what information the police have access to, she came back from her car friendly and smiling. She breathalyzed me and when I didn’t understand how to use the breathalyzer she was even more amused. We had come equipped to the Hunter Valley with recommendations from several winos so headed straight for some particular wineries and each of them was
a big success. I sincerely hope no one uses this blog for any actual information purposes, but in case you do the wineries we visited were Petersons, De iuliis (not a typo – in face I double checked the spelling), Tyrrell’s, Brokenwood, Pepper Tree, Andrew Thomas & The Little Wine Company (At the Small Wineries Centre) and Audrey Wilkinson. We purposely went during the week rather than the weekend so it wouldn’t be so busy. That turned out to be a great plan as we got excellent service at each of the vineyards. The servers were very friendly, knowledgeable and poured a generous tasting. Once they figured out that we were interested in learning about the wine they spent a lot of time talking to us and in almost every winery they pulled out a bottle that they don’t normally give tastes of and poured it for us. The woman in Audrey Wilkinson was our favorite and brought a certain unexpected raunchiness to wine tasting. We all just about spit out our wine when she offered to pour us a lovely ver-dildo. None of us will ever be able to order a Verdehlo again with a straight face. Again, I
have to reiterate that I was only having the occasional sip of the wines that were likely to be favorites. I can’t say the same for my esteemed colleagues. They were well and truly sozzled by the end of the first day. Despite that “eagle eyes” Shelagh managed to spot a family of kangaroos which lead to a great photo stop. We stayed at Harrigans Irish Pub which we would also recommend. Don’t worry, it’s actually also a hotel, we weren’t just so wine-soaked that they had to throw us in the storage room for the night (I know that wouldn’t surprise some of you). We stopped at a few more vineyards on the second morning and Simon managed to have 3 glasses of sparkling at the first vineyard before 11 am. Overall a couple of very fun days as the wineries are just a few minutes apart by car so easy to visit. Then we headed out on the long…long…drive to Lennox Head
We stopped in Grafton at about 7 pm to get some dinner and some groceries for the next morning. It was one of the weirder shopping experiences of my life. We went to
Woolworths, which is one of the big grocery store chains here and generally quite nice. The store appeared to be full but at the same time didn’t seem to have any food. For example, there wasn’t any bread. To be fair it was almost closing time but the section that should have the wall of premade bread…didn’t exist. The four of us wandered around for about 15 minutes and came away with crackers and an apple or something. So weird. Oh, on an only vaguely related note – they don’t put eggs in the fridge here. This weirds me out. And, every time I go to buy eggs I probably check 10 cartons before I find one without broken eggs in it. And I’m not even exaggerating there.
Anyhoo…The plan was to head up the coast to try to get a few days of Aussie beach lifestyle. We picked Lennox Head because it is small and less busy than its famous neighbor Byron Bay, but close enough to do a day trip to Byron for diving and such.
We spent a morning on the beach and an afternoon drinking beer and watching the kitesurfers
and windsurfers on the ocean. They seemed to be enjoying the gale force winds but we were terrified for them as them went flying away out to sea and back.
On the second day we went to Byron Bay. Kat and Simon hung out on the beach while Shelagh and I went diving to Julian Rocks. The diving was pretty good and we got to see swimming turtles and a large Wobbegong shark. The current was pretty strong so we didn’t get to the famous cod hole here. We later cooked a seafood feast at our hotel that night and paired it with about 5 bottles of wine we had bought in Hunter.
Unfortunately the weather turned on us and our days of lounging on the beach were over. We started to head back towards Sydney and on the way passed near “Coutts crossing” which prompted a photo stop. What an exciting year for Shelagh – passing by both Coutts and Coutts crossing! We then stopped for lunch in Bellingen which is a beautiful quaint little town and enjoyed yet another amazing café lunch. No one does café lunch like the Aussies. Unfortunately our plan to wander through
town drinking coffee and shopping and such was curtailed by the absolute deluge that came from the sky. The storm was unreal. Our waiter told us that the highway closer to the coast was flooded out and that the road out of town would probably flood soon. So, we hit the road. We spent the night at Port Macquarie. We went to a great restaurant called the Stunned Mullet owned by a Canadian. It was one of those nights that only happen with Kat and Simon where it ended in the owner putting a bottle of port on our table for us while the staff began to clean up. The next day was…headachey.
We went to the Billabong Wildlife Park to get some exposure to the Australian animals that so far hadn’t introduced themselves to us in the wild. I’m going to preface this by saying we did not know before we went and still don’t know now if this is classified as a “good” zoo or one of those sort of weird, questionable small zoos. However, the animals seemed healthy and well fed and it does seem to be connected to other zoos for breeding and
conservation programs so we think it’s legit. But …we were jonesing to see koalas so we went. We arrived just in time for Koala petting. Its amazing how long you can spend standing staring at and taking pictures of an animal that is too stoned to move. They are so cute. One sad little critter was a rescue and his rescuers never taught him to “perch” so he just sits on the ground by the base of his tree. He looked so lonely and like the weird kid. However maybe he was smarter than the rest because he was the only one not at risk of falling out of his tree at any moment.
We then fed some kangaroos which was cool to get so close to them. They behave like deer, have faces like camels, and of course hop. So strange. There were several moms with baby joeys in their pouches and a family of albino ones. Oh, pitty the poor albino animal in this climate – us pale and pasty Johnsons have some idea what they must go through.
A couple of things struck as odd in this zoo:
Thing #1 - they
have two dingos in the zoo and they are bigger than I expected them to be. I’d say they were wolf sized when I expected them to be coyote sized. That’s not the weird part. The weird part is that they bring the male out on leash and let small children pet his head. Everyone knows that Dingos eat babies.
Thing #2 -they have a big crocodile in the zoo – maybe 4-5 m long (aka full on people eating size). They do a crocodile show where they feed him and have got him “trained” to come take the food off of a pole that the trainer holds out. The whole time the trainer is talking about how it can leap way up, move so fast, snatch food, etc. But there he is, standing beside the pool, holding dead chicken, coaxing the crocodile out. [youtube=
] We all watched the show with a bit of horror. My favorite picture is the one of Simon taking pictures. The look on his face clearly shows that he doesn’t think this is a good idea. It ended without carnage, which presumably it does most days. I just think based on what we learned
in the Northern Territory that the people up there would think this is a very stupid way to handle a crocodile. This trip is helping me narrow down my career choices, both crocodile egg gatherer and crocodile “trainer” are seriously out. (I just watched the video and it doesn't look as horrifying as it felt at the time)
Back in Sydney we spent a few days just soaking up the city with Kat and Simon. We did the classic Bondi to Bronte coastal walk. This is an amazing walk and despite how many tourists are there its still an amazing place. Then we enjoyed a well-earned drink at Icebergs – the famous bar on Bondi beach. Icebergs has an ocean swimming pool and when we were there huge waves were crashing into the outside lane. Swimmers had to stop occasionally to throw large piles of seaweed back into the ocean. You’d have to be a pretty strong swimmer to chose that lane! We heard a tale of a woman actually swept out into the ocean from the pool.
Shelagh had been planning a pub crawl in “The Rocks” through the oldest pubs in town. She was
excited to take Kat and Simon to all these cool old pubs with craft beer that she had found. First stop was the Lord Nelson, then Hart’s pub…it was supposed to continue longer, but Shelagh fell asleep. This may have happened before…
The weather then well and truly closed in for the weekend. Crazy storms like which we haven’t seen before. We have never heard thunder so loud or seen as heavy rain before. This led us to head to musuems and pubs - usually in that order. We ended the weekend at a great restaurant for dinner on Sunday night – Chiswicks. Chiswick’s in run by the same chef who runs the very posh Aria restaurant at the opera house. We had a great meal. Before dinner we found another of the old style pubs – the Lord Dudley.
There is a Wine Society that promotes Australian wine. You buy a membership and get a discount but also can attend their events etc. They are located 3 blocks from our house. It costs $50 to buy into the society, they give you a $50 gift card and when you cancel your membership they
give you your $50 back. I’m not quite sure why everyone doesn’t join. Oh, there is a $250 minimum annual spend…I imagine that might be a problem for some people…we were $4 short of it on our first trip. One of our days back in Sydney we decided to cook a seafood feast including Morton Bay Bugs (verdict – delicious but a lot of effort for a small amount of meat), prawns and calamari. We bought wines to pair with each course – the staff are great at making recommendations for this type of thing. The first wine was a sparkling Rose that was so good! So good in fact, that we sent Simon back to buy another bottle (or two, or something, it’s a bit fuzzy). While he was there they told him that we were the number 3 top customer for the wine society for November. We bought our membership Nov 6. It was November 16. We were away for a week in the middle of that. Oh no. The next day was…headachey…
We had a great time exploring with our friends and are so glad they came to visit!
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heather
non-member comment
they remind me of Marley when they are all chill like that!