First Day of Winter

It is officially the first day of winter (June 1st). How crazy is that? As if it wasn't hard enough keeping track of a 17 (or 14? 20?) hour time difference to home/family, counting back both hours and days, the entire season switch is hard for my head (not to mention circadian clock) to adjust to!

Hannah and I went on a tour of the Hunter Valley wine region today. We had a crazy tour guide Tex who told us Newcastle is the number one coal exporter in the WORLD! And apparently this place also exports sand to Hawaii. But we saw the giant ships lined up to get into the harbour to get loaded with coal and take it to all the corners of the world and continue heating our planet up like a hot cake. Sometimes there are 70 ships waiting and they can only load about 5 a day! I guess it is a pretty flawed system.

But speaking of pretty, the wineries themselves were lovely. The vines are just being pruned, so about half of them still have their beautiful green and gold leaves left on the vine. We went to 4 very different wineries and tasted some really great stuff. The most popular wines produced in this region are the dry semillion and shiraz. We tasted a couple of muscats that were described as "Christmas pudding in a bottle" and the two English on our tour were both thrilled with this discovery. After a number of in depth conversations with my British compatriot about puddings (desserts to us lay folk) I got a taste of what all the talk is about. (To me the muscat tasted like runny molasses, but I guess that is the desired effect). I did discover that I liked an un-oaked Chardonnay (I didn't even know such a thing existed) and we had a couple of lovely sweet wines with names like "Juliette", "Sticky", and "Tickle". Any guess who those are marketed to?

Along with wine and scenery, we got to do some cheese, candy, and fudge tasting. I rolled out of that valley sleepy and happy!

The wineries really rounded off our Newcastle experience- yesterday we went to a coffee and chocolate fair- after weeks of hiking in the desert, our piggy sides have come out. There was a disappointing lack of chocolate (made up for it by the fudge, no doubt) but the coffee was tasty and we got "slabs" of pizza for lunch covered in roasted eggplant and sweet potato. Weird, but in a good way.

After stuffing ourselves at the street fair, listening to a local band, and visiting every shop open in Newcastle on a Sunday we went for a walk to the lighthouse and got buffeted by the wind. For all its industry, Newcastle was a really lovely place, and a contender for a livable city!