Friday, June 09, 2006
Day 3
Day 3
We got up very early this morning to catch an express train into town. We needed to be at the Mecure Hotel by 7:50 this morning to catch a motor coach. We headed to Hunter Valley, wine country, for tours and tastings. After several hours on the coach, we saw a variety of different animals like kangaroos and wombats (and more common critters like cows, horses, and sheep). The tour guide pointed out all manner of constructed features like old roads, run off culverts, and so on that had been build by convicts in the 19th century. In addition, he pointed out that mail boxes can be ANYthing. We saw everything from refridgerators to barrels to birdhouses that had been converted for mail use. In the U.S. you have to use certain standard boxes. Not so here.
We stopped at Mount Pleasant winery for lunch and tastings and bought a bottle of Semillon to bring back to the flat with us. We had a pretty nice meal of chicken or fish, bread and salad. I tasted just over a half dozen wines including a pretty marvelous tawny port.
After Mount Pleasant we went to the McGuigan winery. I am very familiar with the Bin 2000, which is a pretty amazingly jammy, black current, melon, slight bacony extravaganza. We didn't taste that, but we did sample about 10 different wines a few of which were fabulous. We walked out of there with a bubbly and a Sauvignon Blanc.
We purchased entry to the Hunter Valley Gardens which, even in the middle of winter, were pretty fabulous.
The trek back was pretty late--we didn't get back to the flat until 9ish this evening. We're going to skip our city tour tomorrow morning--just too much for our small family to handle in such a short time.
The day started out with torrents of rain, but cleared up nicely for the tour and began raining again pretty much immediately after the tour finished.
All in all, it was a very satisfying day.
