More wine please...

We drove from Canberra to a nearby roadside pull in but suffered a pretty rough night of sleep. A road-train got stuck in the camping area having pulled off the road and not realised it was only for cars. Somehow, and with an impressive series of reversing manoeuvres, he managed to escape; we watched this going on through the curtains in the van, feeling relieved we'd parked where we had. Sadly all the engine revving and reversing 'beeep beeep beeep beeeep' had rendered us very awake at 2am.

We drove north avoiding Sydney as best we could (we go back there later and we wanted to avoid the tolls, traffic and general chaos of the city for now). The Hunter Valley region is just west of Newcastle (which has places called Hexham and Jesmond nearby) and was a peaceful, lush and golden-green haven for sleep-deprived travellers. Oh and they also make wine there!

We went to McGuigan's winery on the recommendation of my friend Judith. It was a well-made recommendation as even Josh declared he 'really liked that one' when tasting their 2012 Semillon, so we bought a bottle and headed next door to sample some very overpriced cheese. It was getting on for 5pm by this point and many places were closing or not offering tastings of their cheese, olives and chocolate. We found one more that was open till 6pm so tried a few wines there and wandered around the sculpture garden. The lady recommended a nice free campsite in a nearby village of Broke. We were glad we took her advice as the campsite was a quiet little woodland spot with a couple of other caravans. We had a nice relaxed evening listening to the gorgeous magpie song (magpies sound totally different here, like they've swallowed a small flute, it's a lovely sound), eating risotto and sampling the wine (which we had to enjoy cold). We got into the van for an early night of sleep having been eaten alive by mosquitos.