Tuesday, 18 April, 2017

Happy Birthday, Julie! None of us registered this until Jan later in the day.

In any case, we travel today to the Barossa Valley for the main highlight of our road trip – the Barossa Valley Vintage festival. We went to this 4 years ago and it was quite good so wanted to bring Jan and Hugh to it this year.

We have a small breakfast in the Motel in Jan & Hugh’s room as it is bright and sunny on their side. Julie and Hugh had some fruit they had bought in Penola yesterday while Jan and I shared her takeaway steak from last night. The ubiquitous bleu cheese also featured.

We drive out of Coonawarra, through Padthaway and join the Western Highway at Keith. We drive for a couple of hours and decide it could be time for more coffee and a toilet stop. We stop in the fine town of Coonalpyn.

Coonalpyn is not my favourite town in the world because many years ago, in the 70s, I was driving over to Adelaide on the Thursday before Easter when my car broke down totally in Coonalpyn. We were forced to stay the night in the local Hotel and then leave the car behind to eventually get fixed. We were lucky enough to get a ride from another Hotel guest to Adelaide airport where are Adelaide friends picked us up. We still went around to wineries at Barossa and McClaren Vale and took the train back to Coonalpyn when the car was fixed. We loaded around 20 dozen boxes of wine on the train and then took them off at Coonalpyn station.

Jan and Julie crossed the street from where we had our coffee and went to the loo.

The girls had walked through the big city, population 231 in 2006, and had seen several vintage cars in some kind of rally.

We got back on the road and turned off the Western Highway at Murray Bridge (town) to go the back way into Barossa. We go over the Old Murray Bridge and are very lucky because it was closed yesterday and will be tomorrow. We eventually drive through the back way in and over the hills to Tanunda and our Airbnb place for the next 4 nights, The Barossa Villa. It is large, modern, well appointed and very comfortable. No photos, but refer to the following link. They have left us some breakfast stuff and figs from the vine outside.

The Barossa Villa from Airbnb

After settling in we are finally hungry so have some more of the wonderful bleu cheese eventually with some figs. After Julie returned from going for a walkabout, we decide to go to a couple of wineries. For those that don’t know Australia, Barossa is a large wine growing area with a significant number of wineries. There are over 150 wineries and over 80 cellar doors. The Barossa was originally settled in the mid 19th century, primarily by German immigrants. It still has that German feel with Wurst shops and delis and restaurants albeit probably not as much when I first went there in the 70s.

The Barossa’s Website

The Barossa was originally famous for its white wines, especially riesling, and cheap sparklings but in recent years has become famous for its premium Reds, especially Shiraz. The first winery we go to is Murray Street where we had done well four years ago.

The Server is very interesting as she had an Eastern Europe accent but was actually from South Africa.

I found the wines OK but probably a bit expensive for what they were. Next we go to Seppelts. It is a very large wine company with large land/building holdings in Barossa, Hunter, Great Western etc. We stop by but it would seem that they were in a transition period where nothing was open.

Our Airbnb host, Wyndham, had suggested and then booked our restaurant for the night – Appellation. On Tuesday nights it has a special “locals night”. There is no menu and the chef prepares special dishes to bring to the tables. We arrive early and have a drink.

We are one of the first to our table. Each course has two different dishes which are randomly distributed to us. There was a lot of interesting dishes, as follows, but I am not sure what many of them were.

Link to Appellation as a part of the Louise complex

We departed for home and crash after a pretty good day. We have another big one tomorrow.

Monday, 17 April, 2017

Today we head into South Australian wine country with our first stay to be in Coonawarra. This is the home of the famous Terra Rossa or red soil which gives the wines some extra flavours making it arguably the best wine area in Australia for red wines, especially Cabernet. We start the day by leaving our fine Airbnb “barn”.

Note the barn on the right of picture, that was where we stayed. There are a few tourist sites around Portland but we decided to get on the road instead. We drive to Mt Gambier, the major city along the way, for petrol and brunch. The town is very crowded – it is Easter Monday and a lot of people are in transition as they end their 4 day Easter holiday. After petrol, we park and walk around looking for chow. A lot of the places are very crowded but a local points us to one off a side road. We go there, it is a large place and packed but we get the last available table.

There are a number of volcano craters and sink holes in the area. One famous tourist destination is the Blue Lake, a former volcano filled with water. During some times of the year / day, it is apparently bright blue – I have been there 3 times and never seen it that blue

We drive out of Mt Gambier to Penola which is the gateway to the wineries. Julie remembered going to an interesting herb farm when we were here 4 years ago and amazingly found it in the back streets of Penola. It had been run by a nice old lady but she was not there and probably had passed on.

After picking up some supplies, we drive into the wine area itself. We are staying in a Motel this night and when we arrive it is earlier than check-in time but the nice lady let us check-in any way. The Motel is structured as several single level wings with rooms back to back. We had a pair of these with a connecting door. We decide to go out to some wineries and the first stop was at Wynns, a large Coonawarra winery.

We tasted a number of good wines inside. I picked up a few bottles for the road. We then went on to Redman’s a multi-generational family owned winery. We try a few wines and I picked up some bargain basement Shiraz. But the most intriguing aspect was this:

It was explained to us that this is used to make a lot of their wines aiming for $20 bottles of wine. In my opinion Great Grandfather / Grandfather Bill / Owen Redman would have turned in their graves. Our last winery for the day was Bowen Estate. Doug Bowen and his wines had been a favourite of ours. Apparently he was in a consultant role now with his daughter being the wine maker.

We go back to the Motel for a bit of a rest before deciding what to do about dinner.

We went to a couple of good restaurants when here 4 years ago but it is a Monday night and they are closed. There is a restaurant in front of the Motel and we decide to go there. As we enter, we are their only customers – later another couple comes in, but that is it. Any way, the owner seems like a nice guy and the menu was OK so we order.

Jan didn’t eat a lot of it so we took the remainder for take away. We talked to the owner for a while and he explained that the restaurant used to be owned by the Motel owner. However, they went into receivership and he had bought the restaurant and the house associated with it. I hope he does OK but might be a challenge. Any way, the food was pretty good for a Motel restaurant.

We also talked to the other couple who came in after us. They had hit a Mother Kangaroo on the road, killing it and sending its Joey flying. Sad. They said there car, while drive-able, was quite a wreck and walking back to our rooms we saw it and it certainly was a mess. Off to bed!

Thursday, 13 April, 2017

The other place that I always take our overseas visitors is the Healesville Wildlife Sanctuary at which visitors can view Australian Native Wildlife primarily in an environment similar to their natural one.

Firstly, Julie and I get up early to go to the Vic Market to pick up supplies for the Good Friday feast, tomorrow. After our return, Jan, Hugh and I hop in the car to drive out to Healesville which is about an hour’s drive.

When we get there, we run into a horrible issue – it is school holidays and there are 50 million obnoxious, snotty-nosed, loud kids (OSNLKs) everywhere. The parking lot is full and the overflow parking lot, which I did not know existed, was also full with cars driving around looking for a spot. Eventually we drive down the road almost 2 kilometers away to park and hike back to the sanctuary.

We are able to get in for Senior’s rates even though Jan & Hugh did not have a Senior’s Card. But we quickly discovered that all the “extra events” like the up close with the animals or the bird show were completely booked out by the OSNLKs. Most of the following photos of the animals were taken by Jan.

You may have heard the African jungle sounds in movies, e.g. Tarzan, with a bird’s long chilling cry. Well, that is actually this Australian bird making those sounds.

#####The Devil is facing extinction because of a horrible face virus or fungus. The Sanctuary is leading the fight to isolate and breed the devils without it. See the following scan which is a good reflection of what the Victorian Zoo scene is all about.

I highly recommend any visitor or even locals to visit the Sanctuary. There are lots of other views not in our photos like the Platypus, small little animals, Snakes – Australia has the most poisonous snakes in the world, Eagles / Hawks, etc. We had a nice Thai Red Curry Pie for lunch and continued on the wander but eventually got tired and departed. We still had the long walk down to the car and the drive back to town.

Back at home, Hugh had some of the beers Julie had bought.

Julie had got home from work ahead of us, surprise, and after a quick dinner, construction of dessert for tomorrow’s festivities commenced. The chosen artifact was a Pavlova, Australia’s invention (or New Zealand’s depending on who you talk to) which involves beating up egg whites and sugar to make a base crust. We do not do things simply around here, instead of a nice, efficient electric beater, Julie uses an old hand driven one that needs the strength and endurance of a blacksmith.

Enough, it is a big day tomorrow with a number of guests.