Hunter Valley

If you ever find yourself in Sydney with even a day to spare, I strongly urge you to make a trip to the Hunter Valley, which is a pretty famous wine growing area in the region. It's barely two hours away, and even if you can't drive there yourself, there are buses and trains that will take you. There are several tour companies that offer day trips from Sydney as well, so you can get spend the day doing a wine tour and be back in the big city by dinner time.

The valley itself is quite beautiful; low mountains and rolling hills, many of which are covered in vineyards. The Hunter Valley is famous primarily for its Shiraz, Chardonay, and Semillon wines, and when you do a wine tour you end up sampling lots of those types of wine.

We spent one night in the Hunter Valley, leaving Sydney early in the morning to arrive in time for a 10 a.m. wine tour. Carlisle was gracious enough to lend us his car for the trip. I was a bit nervous about driving even though they drive on the same side of the road in Australia as they do in Japan. Once we got out of Sydney though, the driving was easy, and once we got off the highway and into the countryside it was awesome.

Our one mistake in the trip was our choice of accommodation. We opted for a slightly cheaper place that was nowhere near any of the vineyards and had none of the charm of the places that are affiliated with vineyards. I'm pretty sure there were people living in the hotel, actually. But the owners were totally cool and let us check into our room when we showed up at 9:30 in the morning, so no real complaints.

My advice, however, is definitely spring a few extra bucks and get a place out away from town, out in the hills, so you can take in those blazing stars and beautiful atmosphere. Most places have gourmet restaurants, and all the wine you could ever want, so it's the way to go.

As much as I loved driving around the winding roads through the vineyards, it wasn't totally relaxing. The thing there is that the speed limits on these country roads is 100 kph, which is about 60 mph. The speed limit in Japan, on the highway, is 80 kph. The speed itself wasn't so much a problem as was my frame of mind. Here I am, cruising along eating up the scenery and basking in the beauty of the place at a cool 80 kph or so, when every couple of minutes a friggin semi comes roaring up behind me and is instantly on top of us. I don't know how many times I pulled over to let giant trucks or rushed locals go flying by.

So, Hunter Valley = good place. Go there. Drink wine.

And enjoy the first picture here while you can, because as soon as Chieko sees it I will be in trouble and it will be gone. But it's a nice picture, I think. That's what we look like when we drink wine for several hours before lunch.