Long Weekend, so what does a Sydneyte do?? Run out of town of course! If you have a learner driver who needs to get some hours up in an attempt to drive 100hours during the learning phase a long weekend is perfect.

Saturday just before lunch we headed off. I drove to Richmond and then the learner took over. I made her drive up the Bells Line of Road, rather than up the freeway, because its 20 years since I went that way, and because I remembered it would be less crowded (most of Sydney decamps for a long weekend away). Yep right on both counts. We had a light lunch at the Zig Zag Railway at Clarence, took a ride on the train, disel on the way down and classic steam on the way back up the hill.

We changed drivers after the train trip, and once we got to Lithgow changed again. (She still needs approximately 20 hours practice). We drover into the little town of Mudgee late saturday night, walked from the motel into town and had Thai food for dinner, yummmm and back to the motel for an early night.

There was some kind of wine festival on in Mudgee this weekend, so Sunday, as we explored, we followed crowds around some of the wineries for tastings. (solved this problem by hitting the smaller wineries), and the cheese place, but really the lady doing the tasting was both run off her feet by the "get drunk for free" brigade, that when she was looking after my daughter and I she was just mentally adding us to the list, so she was very short and abrupt, and poured too much wine in the glasses, and just assumed we wanted to try everything they offered. Forget it, trying to interrupt her was useless, and so we just left, money still in pocket. Maybe we'll try there again on a quieter weekend.

Thistle Hill is so nice I have booked a few days holiday in their cottage for winter next year (so funny, one of the local women was talking to the proprietor when I was arranging this, and gave me such a quizzical look as to why I would want to come there in the middle of winter? Perfect knitting weather, I told her, usually dry but so frosty, and clear, what could be nicer. Tropical Queensland was her answer! Its always greener in someone else's backyard eh?)

Photos will eventually follow, but blogger took four tries to post the previous picture, so maybe I will flikr and then slide them across that way.

The way home later ...... (to be continued)

posted by gemma @ 10:44 am