Day 15- The Hunter Valley

May 10, 2011- Day 15

Where: The Entrance to The Hunter Valley, NSW

Dinner: Top Ramen! Not nearly as good as real ramen :(

        Another successful street parking sleep adventure! Woke up to a a lovely sunrise with some very dark clouds on one half of the sky. The beach we were at had huge sand jetties going out to the water, with a sort of lake inlet. I love when there are inlets because then the sky reflects off of the still water. We got up and moved to a parking lot where we had meusli and coffee because that seems much better than making coffee on a sidewalk while people walk their dogs past you. But maybe that's just me. We drove a bit west away from the coast into the Hunter Valley. This valley is a grape growing wine producing area and we decided to do a wine tasting day. We got the map of all the vineyards in the area and started driving. There were so many vineyards we could literally stop every two minutes if we wanted to. Most of the vineyards had beautiful cellars to do wine tastings in. I've never been that into wine, but having someone explain them to me while being able to compare them to each other was really fun. I definitely found some wines that I enjoyed, particularly the semillions, verdelohs, and my favorite was the botrytis semillion, a dessert wine. Apparently they let the semillion grape over ripen until the point that mold grows over it and it starts to wither. When it loses that much water the sugar is all left behind, leaving a very sweet grape. Oh man, it makes a tasty wine. I was the driver so Pat got to do more of the tasting. It was a lovely sunny day and the valley we were in was full of colorful fall trees. Pat enjoyed being able to use the word “pastoral” excessively. It certainly was an appropriate location for the word! We stopped in the parking lot of a big public garden to make a tasty salad for lunch. A woman at one of the vineyards told us about a free campground nearby so we went there for the night. We were having an unmotivated evening so I ended up making ramen noodles for dinner. So not as good as the real ramen! It got really cold in the night, probably the coldest night for far. The van actually stays fairly warm, but I had to get the wool socks out.