After about 10 wine cellar doors and about 60 wine samples the CB and I have been coerced / seduced / bribed / convinced to buy copious bottles of wine from numerous wine producers. And why not. If it works for you, go with it, right. Unfortunately as the wine stocks increase in the limited space at the back of our small SUV, we have to consider dumping clothes as our wine stocks have expanded. Theoretically this is not a difficult decision because the child bride and I thought we would experience much colder temperatures in southern climes than we have. So the coats could go. Except the furthest place north we have visited on this trip – Stanthorpe – is the coldest. I wore a coat tonight which I last wore in Alta which is at the top of Norway.
While on the subject of cars (sort of) , it took us almost 8.5 hours to do a trip that was predicted to take 7.5 hours, from Mudgee to Stanthorpe. The reason for this miscalculation has nothing to do with my pensioner-like driving. I have a BMW that goes like a scalded cat when I hit the after-burners and I have been known to very generously interpret speed limits. But when there are more roadworks than road and each road works zone comes with its own traffic lights, you can understand the problem. We encountered at least 10 red lights. And why do councils feel the need to block off a couple of kilometres of road to do about 10 metres of work. I can only assume it’s so they have plenty of room to park numerous vehicles which are not being used, presumably to save fuel. Or something.
Having now arrived home the child bride and I can look forward to a few alcohol-free days which sounds kind of counter-intuitive considering we have just spent 10 days sampling wines in three different wine producing regions. It could have been worse because there are about 300 cellar doors in those places and we only got to a relative handful. We’d have needed another 10 days to get round all of them.