Sand and Wine

This weekend we took advantage of the weather and hired a car, this time to head north to aussie geordie land...Newcastle :) It's about a 2 1/2 hour journey up there and we took the scenic route up route 1 and across to Gosford and up to The Entrance and north. By sheer fluke, this took us right past Lake Macquarie which is the largest salt water lake in Australia. It's probably the same size as the entire lake district or something, nature seems big here. We stopped off half way up the lake for a bite to eat (we made sandwiches, had apples, and stuff!!!) at Norah Head. We wandered down the beach so we could walk off the ham and cheese butties and get some shells in the process. In the rock pool was a massive pelican, Andrea called him "Sid" and fed him some crumbs from our butties. Sid had the most amazing eyes and was about the same size as Andrea, but not quite as big as me ;)

Burning daylight we headed to Newcastle. We're not really interested in Newcastle as it's quite an industrial town and there's not a lot to see....except for the Pasha Bulker in which some (I might be making this up) drunken sailor drove it into the beach. I mean the guy must of been really desperate for a kebab. It's been pretty big news here and thousands of people have been going up to see it and the attempts by the authorities to move it. As i write this now though, it has just been moved off the beach and onto deeper water (where it'll probably sink or something). If this was in Britain, the burger and ice cream vans would of taken full advantage of the crowds going there to watch. Much to the disgust of Andrea's belly, there was nothing here except for a Hare Krishna taking the opportunity to spread the word and give away free books. We also saw the Channel 10 network doing a news broadcast from the site though, which was nice.

We stopped over at Nelson Bay in Port Stephens. We'd heard a lot about this place as it was a hub for backpackers to go off elsewhere, much like Airlie Beach. So we found the cheapest possible Motel...very classy as it had genuine brick walls on the inside of the room! No bloody heating though as we found out. Anyway, we were both starving so had to hit the town. At 8:00 this place was a ghost town. Half the restaurants were closed, the only pub that was open was like some labour club. We ate at one of the few places open and then just went to the supermarket for some munchies (past the tramp and the tumbleweed) ;)

Up early the next day, having a one of Red Ned's pies for breakfast. This guy professes to have over 50 different pies and has won the best pie award in Australia, Andrea asked for a "cheese and onion" pie, but just got a gruff "no" in return. Andrea settled for a Kangaroo pie i had a mince beef and cheese one.

From here we traveled south to Anna Bay to see the massive sand dunes which are the largest in the southern hemisphere, they even had camel rides but it was too cold for that. It's also a place to see whales migrating at this time of year, but the sea was far too choppy to see anything.

On our journey west we mulled over the idea of heading north a bit to go to a place called "Stroud" which is twinned with my home town, but it was too much of a drive out of the way and some fancy wine tasting in the Hunter Valley beckoned. Even though we weren't going to actually buy anything we still managed to come out of the place with some cheese, chocolate and 8 bottles of wine. The place is full of really good vineyards, hotels and restaurants. Andrea said that i went all posh when discussing the wine with the sellers, i was just going along with it all and saying the words they wanted to hear :) We even saw some Passion Pop going cheap (if that's possible) ! After that it was the long journey back to Sydney stopping off for fish and chips and a traffic jam. We didn't realise it until the next day but the car absolutely stunk of fish, dropping the car off at the hire place i kinda left before they went inside it ;)