Hunter Valley Vineyards

A gorgeous weekend in the Hunter Valley (March 10 and 11). We stayed at fancy Tallawanta Lodge, adjacent to the Hunter Valley Gardens, a recently built botanical extravaganza. Walked and drove to a handful of wineries, including Lindemans. Pokolbin Mountain is the big hill in the background of the Lindemans photo. We drove up a long, narrow dirt road to the top of the mountain and some spectacular greenery along the way. It is about a 2.5 hour drive from Sydney to the Hunter wine region, on roads and through country towns and some rolling hills that reminded Sarah and me of the drive from New York City to the Berkshires.

I think the kids' best memory from the weekend will be the Aqua Golf, which was a driving range next to our lodge where you hit the balls into a small lake dotted with net baskets attached to metal signs advertising area businesses. There were probably about 20 baskets. If you hit your ball into the basket you got a reasonable prize from that business, mostly restaurants and wineries. Nick kept getting close to Swill and Grill (a chain of local steak places.) Near the end of our second visit I finally got a ball into a basket, winning a voucher for one free dinner at a nearby historic brewery/hotel.

Sydney Harbor Bridge 75th Birthday Walk

The bridge walk was very exciting, despite the cloudy weather. Hundreds of thousands of people walked across the closed span, starting at 10 AM and ending around 7:30. We did it at 12:30 in a sea of walkers, and it took around 45 minutes to cross. Around 5:00, while we were waiting for a train out of town on the bridge approach ramp at the Milsons Point station, the bridge was still packed with people. Everyone got free bright green (or yellow?) souvenir hats. No corporate logos on the caps, by the way, and very little sponsor advertising anywhere else for that matter.

The bridge was wired with sound--speeches, news reports and music representing each decade of the bridge's existence. As you walked along you passed through a soundscape of each era. Near the end of the walk, large wind chimes were strung across the top of the bridge with their music piped through loud speakers, maybe to give the effect of walking into the future. An engaging experience.

The photo of the Opera House was taken from the neighborhood of Kirribilli by Peter. We are standing a couple of blocks from the Prime Minister's house and the Glenferrie Lodge, where we stayed the night before the walk.

Products

I'm thinking of shipping a crate of Black & Gold Three Bean Mix back to Pittsburgh for our next Steelers tailgate party. I like the picture on the Shave Foam can. Of course ... if you're buying generic shaving cream you're probably using a generic razor.

JATZ CLIX!

You call it cotton candy, we call it a dental hygiene tool for the flying creature that leaves money under your pillow when you lose a tooth.
(Snapped in Chinatown, Sydney)

Signage

WHICH ONE ARE YOU?

(photos from a Darling Harbor food kiosk, in Sydney, and Darby Street, Newcastle)

Nicholas caught this next one across the street from a Vietnamese restaurant that we ate at our first night in Sydney. St. George is our bank, chosen for its friendly dragon logo, its proximity to our first Newcastle address, and because my Dad attended St. George grade school and high school. Why not?

Emu was on the menu at the restaurant, by the way, but I went for the crocodile. As expected, it tasted like chicken, and for good reason, according to this sign from the Sydney Aquarium. (I'll take a picture soon of the kangaroo meat section at one of our local supermarkets.)

Falk, not the school, is some sort of worldwide heavy manufacturing concern, with this outpost located minutes from our house. There are about 10 different Falk signs posted around the complex.

Olde timey beer advertising, or perhaps a psychological assessment, at the Oriental Hotel, in Cooks Hill, Newcastle; a way out sign at Central Station, Sydney; and more fun at Guantanamo, near the home of Nicholas' Spanish tutor, in Lambton, Newcastle.

Around Our House

By popular request (thanks Herbert!), here are some pictures of and around our house at 14 Buchanan Street. Note that we ended up on a street with the same name as the only U.S. president from Pennsylvania (James Buchanan, also the only bachelor president), and the house has four too-pruned maple trees in the front (the sickest one is not shown). Good old Pittsburgh-type trees, but they don't seem to be doing very well in dry and hot Australia.

The house was about six months old when we moved in the third week of January. It turns out that furnished rental houses are few and far between in Newcastle, so we were lucky to get this one. A young doctor, her husband and their baby, who have temporarily relocated to Africa for work, are the owners. The doctor's Mom and Dad live in town and are very friendly landlord agents.

Hamilton is a trendy neighborhood formerly filled with Greek and Italian families who are aging and moving out or passing on. Many blocks feature a house or two like ours, modern two-story lot fillers that have replaced more traditional one-story bungalows with backyards. Hamilton was seriously damaged by a 1989 earthquake that killed 6 or so people in Newcastle. Fortunately, from what I understand, reconstruction money poured in and the earthquake had the unintended consequence of contributing to Hamilton's revitalization.

The pictures include two aerial views from the master bedroom of our enclosed back deck, and another shot from the master bedroom east, over the back alley rooftops toward the tree tops in Gregson Park. There are also perspectives from our front gate, down the back alley, and along the front walk, which is lined with bottlebrush trees that bloom with bright red flowers shaped like ... bottlebrushes! And how about that New Orleans-style pink house with the tall palms down the block?

Barrington Tops

Barrington Tops National Park was the first trip we made in our new used car (a very solid Holden Commodore sedan, made by GM. It's a favorite of taxi companies and police forces. I discovered after we bought it that our car was formerly owned by a police department in Queensland).

From the Barrington Tops website: "Carved out of an ancient volcano, it rises from near sea level to over 1500m. In the lower valleys, you'll find World Heritage-listed subtropical rainforests. Up on the plateau, there is subalpine woodland which regularly sees snow in winter."

Unfortunately, we drove up with little planning and only spent a few hours before driving back--1.5-2 hours each way. Beats a roundtrip to Breezewood though, although the road system in Australia is much less developed than in the U.S. What look to be major roads on the map just 30 minutes out of town often turns out to be winding two-lane country roads.

Nicholas, Peter and a new friend that they met at the park are building a dam in the Williams River, which is being considered for a real dam to ease the drought in some parts of Australia. (No water crisis in Newcastle, however. It has rained very regularly in February and March.) The hotel is located in Dungog, the gateway to the southern section of Barrington Tops. A sign on the road approaching the town welcomes to the the "Shire of Dungog". Very "Lord of the Rings", we thought.

Birds We Have Seen This Weekend (In the wild)

Galah(a type of cockatoo)


Rainbow Lorikeet



Kookaburra








Sulphur Crested Cockatoo

The Sunken Garden in King Edward Park

Counting the Coal Boats

This is our first view of the Newcastle coast. Another photo below is from The Obelisk (not shown), which is on a high hump with a panoramic view of the region. It was very windy that day, and the wind was unexpectedly persistent our first few weeks here. Being next to the ocean will do that I guess.

The tankers are waiting to enter the Port of Newcastle to load coal from the Hunter River Valley. They're mostly bound for Asia. It's impossible to show the scope of the coal boat queue in one shot. We counted more than 30 ships the day this photo was taken. Another day there were 28. At one point I thought to myself, "I can't stop counting the coal boats!" Ten minutes later we drove past a house on a hill overlooking the ocean with a For Sale sign that said, "Count the coal boats from your deck." It turns out that the counting is a popular pass time here. A librarian at our neighborhood branch told me that she heard that there were 62 waiting one day. At night, when all the boats are strung with lights, they look like a line of traffic on the turnpike. It also looks like they might be having parties on board. They are a unique feature of Newcastle and a vivid example of Australia's booming natural resources industries.

Bogie Hole

There are a few "ocean baths" in Newcastle--large, square pools cut from solid rock on the coast. Bogie Hole was cut by convicts for the personal bathing needs of one of Newcastle's top military guys way back when. The pool is considered too small and dangerous for general use now, but some people still venture down for a swim. I got a video of a wiry tattooed guy diving into it off of one of the low ledges above the pool. He tried to get his young pre-teenaged-looking son to dive in too, but the kid wouldn't go for it.

Newcastle and Merewether baths are the two primary ocean baths in town. They are very large salt water swimming pools, about five feet deep, and the ocean water is pumped out once every three days. They also both have separate very shallow kiddie pools. Sydney is filled with ocean baths too, according to a recent issue of Australian Traveler magazine, which identified the best ones for a dip.