Back to Victoria

Sunday, 23 April, 2017

In the morning, we have a small snack, the bleu cheese finally finished, and get on the road to drive back to Victoria.

Our Airbnb place, entrance next to the Black Beauty

Once again I have to apologise as most of the photos I took this day did not work out / show up. [BTW: I have bought a new camera for the coming Europe trip so hopefully none of this will happen again]

Any way, we drive from our Airbnb to get over the Adelaide Hills and onto the Western Highway. Google Maps does a poor job sending us in various directions but not to the main highway and we go up into the Hills to Crafers etc. Eventually, we join the freeway and are rolling. Since Julie has departed, I am doing all of the driving which I found very hard work concentrating.

We stop at our favourite? place in Coonalpyn, where Jan and Hugh share a Jaffle, which is kind of a closed in waffle.

After a while we stop in Bordertown at a Roadhouse for lunch. I can’t recall what I have, not very good, and Jan and Hugh shared a chicken schnitzel roll which was by all accounts terrible. We drive into Victoria and stop at Great Western which is home to two very old wineries – Bests and Seppelts (remember that from the Barossa?)

We go into Bests and at least a few photos which are from a self guided tour we did in the cellar of this very old winery.

Shaker Table for Sparkling and other old equipment

Note that it was now closed. We got there fairly late in the day because it was nearly 6 hours of driving. We still had the opportunity to go to Seppelts and tour the champagne drives, which were tunnels carved by miners in the 19th century, but it is decided we have had enough and we drive onto Ballarat where we will stay the night. We are in another Airbnb in a residential area of Ballarat. It is a nice older place well laid out and renovated. The owners had put out breakfast stuff for us and lots of figs from the garden, which are one of Julie’s favourites, too bad she is not here. We did not get to meet the owners but they were clearly very nice people.

We catch an Uber into the “big smoke”, downtown Ballarat. It actually is livelier than I remember when last I was here. Hugh has picked out another Brew Pub where we go in for a taste.

Hugh’s favourite was again the Little Creatures IPA

We agreed that we would have our dinner there, a poor choice in retrospect.

We exit, agreeing that that had been crap food. What with the awful stuff we had on the road in South Australia, this was easily the worst gourmet day of the American Invasion.