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Our meet at Gloucester has finished and now it is time for us to move onto our next stop in the Hunter Valley at Cessnock. Cessnock was recommended to us from members of our club who know the area and suggested here as a good stopping point to investigate this large wine area. Our thoughts are to take our time and visit a couple of wineries each day, there are also a few breweries and some cheese outlets that we want to visit. To get to the Hunter Valley we had to travel back to Stroud and then heading back to Newcastle and diverting onto Cessnock. We are planning to stay at Cessnock Showgrounds and when we arrive there are still plenty of spots available but most have a fair bit of water lying around, we find one that isn't too bad and hopefully it dries out a bit overnight. After setting up and having lunch we drove into the Visitor Centre to pick up information on the Hunter Valley. So far we have had an exciting trip with having our windscreen chipped and having to have that repaired and now our brakes on our car are playing up so we are trying to get a booking into Mitsubishi and just to top that off when we arrived at our destination, Robb's iPhone had decided to die. So in the afternoon we were back in the car driving to the nearest Telstra shop at East Maitland. It was closing at 4.00pm and we arrived at 3.38pm. Luckily it was easily fixed and we were soon back in the car driving to Cessnock for the second time that day. It was a bit of a scary drive as our brakes are very noisy and we are not sure how bad the damage is. We made it safely home thank goodness and I still had time to put the roast on we planned to have for dinner.
Our call to Mitsubishi after rising on Monday morning was a fruitless exercise being told their next available appointment was on the 21 November 2022. Robb searched the local area for brake repairers and found a mobile one and they are available on Tuesday between 12.00 and 2.00pm. That leaves us with nothing to do today and tomorrow morning as our car probably isn't safe to drive anywhere. Inactivity and I are not good bedmates so having one and a half days of just hanging around the van is not appealing to me or Robb. I have spent the day catching up on little jobs that needed taking care of and I have even made pastry to use the left over roast meat from last night in pies from the pie maker for dinner tonight.
Thankfully the repairers called at 8.45am and said they would be there in 5 to 10 minutes, Robb dressed quickly to be ready for their arrival. After an assessment we were given a quote on the work and really what else could we do, we accepted the quote which sounded ok to us anyway and asked that they proceeded with the work. The parts weren't easily accessible in Cessnock so the mechanic had to drive to Maitland for a couple of items. He returned in about an hour and then proceeded to repair the brakes. I made a coffee for us and we sat and read while waiting for the repairs to be completed. When finished we paid for the work and thanked the young man for the excellent service. It was only 11.30am and Robb decided we should go and look around a bit before having lunch out, we chose to visit the Hunter Valley Gardens. We drove directly to the gardens had a quick drive around and then parked at the village where we wandered around looking at the various shops, a lot of which were closed because they just couldn't get staff. We decided to eat at the Taste of The Country a cafe that offered local produce and all day meals where we both chose an Eggs Benedict, Robb with salmon and me with bacon. the food was excellent and I was happy to see the bread they used was one that you could actually cut through. After leaving here we drove to the gardens via the aqua golf course where I took a few photos. The gardens may need to wait for another day as they take 2 hours to walk around and we just felt it was too late in the day.
We have booked a wine tour for Thursday so thought we would choose a few venues to visit ourselves today. I mixed them up a bit so starting with Foghorn Brewery, we moved onto Binnorie Dairy and finished off at Saddlers Creek Wines and lastly Savannah Estate. We came home with two cheeses and two bottles of wine and had a lot of fun on the way.
We booked our tour today with Hunter Valley Prestige tours and I would recommend them when you are in this area. I have to say we have visited lots of wine regions around the country and this would have to be our favourite so far. We started our tour with a visit to Peacock Hill winery a very small family run business that hasn't been established too long, our host Silvi took us through a very educational program on wine tasting and how to choose a good wine that suited our palate. I think we would all agree that this was our favourite stop of the day. We all appreciated learning the language of wine and how to look like someone who knows what they are doing when tasting and selecting a wine for our meals, even if we really don't. From here we moved on to Brokenwood winery, a very different establishment from the first one with a very grand building with lots of room for entertaining. We enjoyed this experience too but not as much as the first one but I have to say the young lady who looked after us went out of her way to choose wines that might appeal to us after listening to our discussions. Our next stop was the Hunter Valley Olive company where we sampled a variety of olive oils and also tasted fudge and chocolate, we came away from here with a garlic olive oil and a mixed bag of chocolate covered coffee beans, this was a nice change from the wineries and it was good to get a bit of food in our bellies. We moved on from here to James Estate where we were guided through another tasting but I must admit we didn't pay much attention at this stage as we had already sampled many wines. There were a couple of their wines I liked so we purchased them on the way out, and apologised for not paying more attention to the talks. Thankfully our next stop was for lunch at 4 Pines At The Farm where we had an average lunch, there wasn't really any meal that you would recommend, probably low standard pub meals is they way I would describe them. We were all really happy though to have something to put into our tummies other than wine. Back in the bus to our next stop which was the Hunter Wine Lab a young family owned business trying to establish in this area, Nathan the owner is quite experimental and we tried some very interesting wines, their Prosecco was very good and we came away with a couple of bottles, I love a good Prosecco. Our last stop of the day, and I think even I was looking forward to finishing up, was at Small Mouth Distillery in the Hunter Valley Gardens. There is a wide range of Vodkas and Gins on offer of every flavour and colour you can imagine and just to add to the interest when you shake the bottles you unleash sparkles into the mix. We came away with one bottle of Blood Orange Gin that is a lovely sparkling red.
There wasn't a lot for us to do the next day but thought we would go in search of a distillery that made a whisky of which we could only find one the Newcastle distillery but their single malt whiskey was $199 for. 750ml bottle and we thought we would rather save our money and buy a Johnny Walker Blue. On our way here we passed the chocolate and fudge factory so made a quick turn into the carpark. The shop was beautiful presented but there really wasn't anything here that interested us enough to purchase the items at extremely exorbitant prices. There were two other stops I wanted to make, one at Roches winery where there is a small complex of shops one of which is the smelly cheese shop where we thought our chances were good to find a nice blue there. They did have a good range of blues, including Tarwin Blue one of our favourites but we can get that back home so we asked what the strongest blue was that they had and we came away with their suggestion, I am looking forward to breaking into this cheese. There is also a Japanese/Thai restaurant in this complex and if we had of had longer in the region we would have given them a try, maybe next time. The last port of call was Harrigan's Irish Pub that had been recommended to us earlier on, we weren't after lunch but thought we would call in for a beer just to check it out. The food looked amazing and Harrigan's will also go on our list for next time but for now they had a large range of beers on tap and I chose a Pale Ale for Robb and a Lager for me. We returned home after this and started packing up for our move tomorrow.
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