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Hunter Valley

Day 1

The day after boxing day we made our exit from Sydney. Since we had to be back on the 30th for my cousin's wedding, the options were to stay in Sydney, go home, or have a couple of nights somewhere else. We decided to go to the Hunter Valley.

We let the GPS guide us out of Sydney, and we managed to avoid the most horrible piece of road in Sydney, which is the five kilometres between Gordon and Hornsby, where it's just stop start the whole way. The GPS took us round the north of all that, and it was much less stressful.

It's amazing the number of L-platers that were out. I reckon they should either be banned from highways altogether or allowed to do the full speed limit. Because forcing them to slow down on the freeways just makes everything slow for everyone else.

We decided not to go up the Sydney-Newcastle freeway, opting to get off at Peat's Ridge and take the back way. We mostly had the road to ourself, and it was a much prettier and less stressful drive.

Bucketty!

Coming down the valley along the Great North Road was very pretty

Spaceman in a sculpture park north of Wollombi

Cessnock is very pretty at the moment with all the trees in bloom

As it turned out, we probably should have gone up the freeway, because we decided to go out to Minmi, which is right next to the freeway. So it was a bit of a detour, but we weren't in any hurry so that was ok.

Crazy big house on Richmond Vale Road

Minmi Courthouse

Caboose in Minmi

I want a liqour shelf like this! Pretty! Popped in here to get a (non-alcoholic) refreshing beverage

Then out to the cemetery to find graves of Stu's rellies

Minmi Cemetery

Stu hunting

Found one!

These guys found their own rellies

Then onto the Crowne Plaza Hunter Valley. A little pricey, but very nice.

Crowne Plaza reception

We got a hotel style room in the main building. There's a tonne of self-contained units around the place that hold quite a few people. They looked lovely, and people were out with deck chairs sipping wine, which totally looked like the life :) They're a bit further away from the main building, and something like $800/night - ouch!

View from our room - not that exciting

What I did love about the place was the abundance of power points. Something like 14 of them around the room, in nice useful places, like right next to the bed. 10 points right there!

Settled in and got ourselves freshened up, then went for a walk around the place

The huge pool. A bit emptier at this point, but it was full of people a little earlier.

Giant chess set (there was a checkers set in the main building too)

Beach volleyball court

Waiting in the Vista Lounge before dinner

The Red Salt restaurant (also the breakfast buffet)

Our view for dinner

We started with this lovely Adina (a local) Pinot Grigio

The sweetie enjoys the wine and the view

Stu's entree. I think this was "Caramelized Tart, of golden shallot and baked locally sourced goat's cheese, witlof salad"

I had "Warm salad of lobster, kipfler potatoes & frisse endive, poached quail eggs & black truffle dressing"

For mains Stu had "Coq au vin free range chicken, braised in Hunter Valley pinot, golden eschalots & smoked bacon, roast garlic puree, fried bread crumbs". This thing was delicious - and look at that huge chunk of bacon! Yum!

I had "Confit duck leg with cassoulet of white beans, lovedale smokehouse sausage & bacon, poached quail eggs". The duck was nice, but too many beans for my taste.

We also had a side of "Sauteed mixed mushrooms with garlic and sherry vinegar (Swiss Browns, Buttons, King Oysters, Enoki)". Omigosh this was so delicious! One of my favourite parts of the meal!

We also had an amazing Rosehill shiraz - so smooth! Yumm!

For dessert we had some Brokenback vintage cheddar (we were too full to eat any more!)

After dinner I was so full I went for a little walk around the place.

Took this nice HDR shot from the entrance area on my phone

Day 2

We had breakfast the next morning at the resort. A pretty decent buffet of food. Was quite crowded though, even though we were there near the end of service.

At 1pm we piled into a little minbus with a family of Swedish people and headed out on a winery tour (stopping to pick up some other people on the way).

Our first stop was Peacock Hill Winery. This was quite a small winery, and was much like the tours we did at Yass last year with a very small cellar door and crowds of people. I found it a bit stressful, but the lady was reasonably well organised, so it wasn't too bad.

They have dinosaurs, which kept the two little Swedish boys amused

Peacock Hill selection of wines

Yeah being driven around the Hunter Valley tasting wines is a lovely way to spend an afternoon

The next stop was McGuigan's. Having heard of this winery it wasn't surprising that they had a much bigger cellar door. And they have this whole room setup for tour groups that looked pretty amazing.

Tour group wine tasting room

Us at McGuigan's

This cork stool looked pretty cool (but $249 and not particularly practical)

McGuigan's also make and sell cheeses. We might have bought some, but didn't have a cooler bag or a fridge at the hotel.

Sunflowers at McGuigan's

Next stop was the Pokolbin village for chocolate and cheese tasting. The chocolate tasting was ok (half a dozen nibbles of chocolate), but the cheese tasting wasn't really anything special. First you had to find the store that was doing it, then you had to ask for the cheeses to taste. Yeah, not ideal.

I did buy this cute little chocolate penguin from the chocolate place.

Our last stop was Brokenwood. This had a medium-sized cellar door and we sat around barrels to do the wine tasting. We even got to taste a wine which was normally only opened for people paying to taste the wines. So that was very nice.

On the way back we got up close to some kangaroos, which I think all the tourists liked :)

So a very nice (although somewhat expensive) afternoon, with half a box of wines and fortified wines acquired :)

For dinner we went to the Grapevine bar for beer and pizza

This was the "Truffled Mushroom" pizza, which sounded nice on the menu (swiss brown, button and enoki mushrooms, white sauce, confit garlic parmesan, thyme and truffle oil) but was a little bland

This was the "Italian" pizza - pepperoni, capsicum, mushrooms, olives, mozzarella, parmesan & chilli, sour cream, thyme and rocket. This was much nicer (I think the sour cream was a winner!)

After dinner the pool was looking nice so I wanted to go for a swim. But a change had come through which made it quite cold. So we didn't stay in long.

Day 3

So our final day.

First stop (after breakfast at the Scottish Restaurant in Cessnock) was a trip to Morpeth to look for more of Stu's relatives in the cemetery. We didn't find any. Just some harness horses trotting by.

Then to St John's College, only to find the whole place has been turned into a retirement village. So far the historic buildings remain, but who knows for how much longer.

Walking around to the chapel

The organ is still there, but the chapel is now a little community hall

And the garden out the back has a gazebo, and the cross has been removed. A bit different to last time we were here.

And instead of a nice view out to the floodplain, all you can see is houses

So that was all a little sad.

Kept wandering.

This is the bridge at Hinton

And we found another probable relative of Stu's in the Hinton Cemetery

Next up the sweetie thought it might be nice to head to Port Stevens, and Nelson Bay and Shoal Bay.

As apparently did the rest of New South Wales

It was so crowded it was painful. We didn't stop anywhere along the beachside. Couldn't have anyway - no parking! Just snapped a pic out the window.

We did stop at the lighthouse though (only because a super huge 4WD couldn't fit into a half sized parking spot, so we got it)

Carried on. Shoal Bay was just as crowded.

Eventually ended up at Fingal Bay where we stopped for lunch a few streets back from the beach, where there was actually parking. Fish and chips and potato scallops. Because that's what you do when you go to the beach. Even though we were nowhere near the beach.

So left the craziness behind and headed back to Maitland to meet up with Margie at the Fox Bar. This a nice little wine bar. We had the whole front area to ourselves, but it was only when I went to the loo that I saw the lovely little garden they have out the back.

And finally headed back to Sydney. Would have been uneventful except a horse float overturned on the freeway near Kariong killing two horses and completely closing the road. The GPS saw it coming and we took a detour around it. No idea if it worked out faster (it probably did) but it was certainly less stressful and no stop-start traffic for us.

Finally made it back to my parent's place and crashed into bed

That

<snip>

but thank you to the people that did make me feel better tonight

and sorry to those who had to put up with me bawling my eyes out

The Social Club

In an effort to be more sociable, the sweetie found a small social club to join. It's nothing fancy - basically just a private camping ground with a partly heated pool on the outskirts of Canberra.

But it does have a nice setting, and the people there, while a little on the "old" side, are nice enough.

Only other interesting stuff on the weekend - going to the Jamo trash and treasure this morning. Accidentally bought a pair of antique binoculars.

Party #3

Another Friday another Christmas party :)

This one has been done to death though - same venue three years running. Numbers (at least from our branch) were significantly down, and a bunch of people from our floor snubbed the party to have their own (which really annoyed me for some reason).

This joke is just *dumb* - bulls are *boys* sheesh ;)

Keira and me in matching tshirts

Numbers were so down that we only had four people to our branch team. So I subbed in on the soccer game. As goalie to avoid having to run around. I still got super hot.

Hi!

A bunch of us hung around for some more drinkies (until the sweetie picked me up).

Rinse and Repeat

Yeah much the same as last night :)

In addition. Apparently all I need to do to get my photos and videos seen is to show the right people... :)

The video I mentioned on Friday night was pretty good, but didn't even come close to the still I got .. oppan Gangnam Style! :)

Mad Mex, Belconnen

Also on Wednesday we went to try out Mad Mex which had just opened this week.

Seems like lots of people had the same idea as us, as the queue was out the door. The service model is much like that of Subway - where you go along the food trays specifying what you want, and pay at the end. Unfortunately this meant for a massive bottleneck at the til, resulting in super slow service. It took us a full fifteen minutes from walking in the door to sitting down with food :( But later the queue had dissipated somewhat, and it would have been quicker then.

The prices were possibly a tad high for the regular meals, around $10 for most things. There's only full sized versions of most menu items, and the nachos I was interested in said they were served with jalapenos (although I probably could have asked them to skip those). So in the end I ordered Nachos plus pork off the kids menu, and at $4.90, that wasn't too bad value.

We'd go back, but only if there wasn't a queue.

Apple + iTunes + iPhone 5 + IOS 6 = Endless Drama

Well the first step in the drama that is Apple was moving my 3GS to another computer. I wasn't interested in any music or playlists, just my apps and settings. So did a final backup on the old computer, made a file system backup of the backup, and then hooked it up to the other computer. It actually went ok, showing up and doing a backup. I then told it to "transfer purchases" which downloaded all the apps off the phone and saved them to the new computer. So yeah the first step went ok. Although I'm not entirely sure that the new computer thinks it's the "true" owner of the phone, but more on that later.

Tuesday night I thought I'd upgrade my 3GS to IOS 6. First step was another full backup. Followed by backup of the backup files on the file system.

Starting the update, I got this message. To which I'm like "but I just *did* a backup!". So I did another backup, and another transfer of purchases.

"There are purchased items on the iPhone "Kazza the Blank One" that have not been transferred to your iTunes library. You should transfer these items to your iTunes library before updating this iPhone. Are you sure you want to continue?"

I also got this message. Which in retrospect suggested that the new iTunes/computer wasn't the "owner" of the phone. But I thought it would be ok. I had backups after all.

"Updating to iOS 6.0 will delete all the apps and media, including iTunes Store purchases on your iPhone. To preserve your content, apply this update on the computer where you sync apps, music, videos and photos. Updating on this computer will only preserve contacts, calendars, text messages and other settings. Please do not interrupt the update, which may take an hour or more to complete."

The next battle was with our router, which keeps dropping off the internet, and so it took me three goes to download the 900mb update. Eventually it came down.

During the update I go this message. Again, I had backups, so I wasn't *too* concerned.

"An error occurred while backing up this iPhone (-50). Would you like to continue to update this iPhone? Continuing will result in the loss of all contents on this iPhone."

This is where things started to get messy. The phone updated and rebooted. It came up blank and wanted to be restored. At one point it came up in the "activation mode" - where nothing actually works until you go into iTunes and activate it. Another restore. This time a blank phone with no apps (although seemingly all the settings for the default apps). Another restore. This time the phone kept rebooting and not staying up. This was after midnight now and I thought I'd bricked the phone. So went to bed but couldn't sleep. Eventually got up again to check on it and the phone had come back up. But still in a default state with no apps.

The next morning I got up thinking I'd lost all my apps/data. But I thought I'd try synching a few of the apps to the phone anyway. And miracle of miracles! All my app data was there!! I was so happy!

So happy that that afternoon I went out and bought an iPhone 5.

I couldn't use it straight away, as I was going to Chris B's for a halloween party. But I was able to use it on wifi there.

Came home and plugged it into iTunes. Also got it going on wifi. Or so I thought. It dropped out twice. A turn off/on of wifi in settings seemed to help. Activated the sim, and was all up and running late that evening. Synched a small set of apps to the phone, and they had all their app data. So I thought I was set.

Not so much.

As it turns out, the wifi problems were actually a lot more major than I thought. What I thought was the wifi dropping out completely doesn't seem to be the case. And it seemed to be intermittent too.

Friday night I installed 6.01, which was *supposed* to fix the reported problems with wifi and wpa2. Yeah no. Not at all. In fact if anything it's worse than it was before.

So this is the latest. I know that wifi connects. In fact I can use a ping app to prove it -

And actually, when I turned wifi off/on it seems that when things worked initially before dropping out, it was simply because it was still using 3G before the wifi kicked in. The ping times are quite high on 3G before it switches to wifi.

So then I thought maybe it was DNS. But my DNS utility continues to work while other apps don't -

So it's got me stumped. Why would ping and DNS apps work, but not regular applications? It's just not logical.

And the other weird thing is that push notifications continue to work. For example, I was on Echofon (Twitter) this morning. I'd get the push notifications to my phone even before my computer showed them in the Twitter timeline. But I couldn't use Echofon to load the timeline. Same thing with DrawSomething. I'd get the notifications that it was my turn, but couldn't actually load a game! How the hell does that work?

So after a week of drama with Apple/iTunes, I'm this >< close to chucking it all in and getting an Android. I don't know if there's any point asking for a new phone - because it's likely to have exactly the same problems right? I feel like I should do some more testing. Try it out a few people's places to see if it has the same problems there. Maybe it's just the interaction with our wifi access point? I don't think there's anything physically wrong with the phone. In fact last night it seemed to work for a couple of hours. So replacing it is not likely to help anyway. The whole thing has made me super depressed. Coupled with lack of sleep all week (even after late nights my body refuses to sleep in past 7am) and I'm just over everything.

Update:

Have done some more testing with DNS. In safari I can access websites by ip address, but as soon as I try their FQDN, things don't work. I've tried static and DHCP for IP address settings. Maybe I should try another DNS server? Maybe IPV6 is confusing things??

Update:

Tried static entries, and tried Google's DNS servers. No luck :(

Update:

*some* sites work ok just as IP addresses - others still don't work

Nara Candle Festival, 2012

Last night the sweetie and I went along to the Nara Candle Festival.

Along with half of Canberra it seemed.

But unlike Japanese festivals, which have similar sorts of numbers, this festival was hopeless under resourced. Which meant queues for everything. One bar, one okonomiyaki stand, one gyoza stand, one noodle stand and a generic Asian stand. We've totally been spoilt by festivals in Japan where they have long rows of stands selling all sorts of amazing food - and no queues!

Crowds

Queues :(:(:( Long ones too

Drumming

Flower arranging

Kendo

Our first lineup at the bar was actually relatively short. Rotary were there serving, but needed some practise at this point.

The sweetie

So we went off to sit and watch some of the acts.

This is a student group from Nara University High School. I missed most of their act though, because I was queueing so long for another drink.

This duo did western songs

The sweetie went off to get some dinner. And while he was gone a group of people came and sat *right next to me*, taking up the space Stu was sitting. #grunt

The udon noodles we had for dinner. Apparently the queue was much longer for the chicken variety. What's with that?? Glad we had this - the okonomiyaki that I saw people eating looked like a big pile of dough with no vegetables to speak of.

So then the sweetie went off to see if he could find his Japanese teacher. And while he was gone this couple came up and setup their directors chairs *right in front of me* #epicgrunt

Had to lean uncomfortably in different directions to see anything, and stand up to take some photos.

When the sweetie got back I was grumpy as, so we went off for a walk.

I thought these kites by the lake looked pretty cool

And the candles sure were pretty

So slightly disillusioned, and still hungry (I wanted meat on a stick!), we stopped in at KFC for meat on a stick.

Productive Weekend

So where were we up to? Hrmmm.. Wednesday. Will add some photos to this post later. At the moment I'm in transition and I don't want to lose things.

Thursday was Neil's birthday, and we got invited over to Chris B's. Picked up some sausages and headed over. Trampolined with Margaret which was fun. Lots of food, lots of booze, a pretty good night :)

Friday, pub lunch at the Lighty. I had quite a nice calamari salad. Then shared a bottle of bubbly with Neil and Doc after work.

Saturday did some video dubbing to DVD. Then out to vote and do some shopping. Gave away some things on Freecycle. Did some bits and pieces around the house and more dubbing. Went over to Potty's for pizza and Jake's birthday party. Lots of peoples there.

Sunday morning I spent an hour and a half in the back garden hacking a path to the back gate (I should have taken a "before and after" photo to show the difference!). And gave away the Hills Hoist that we've been wanting to give away since we moved in four years ago. Yayyyyyy!! Cooked some okonamiyaki for lunch in an attempt to get through our veggie box. Watched The Last Samurai with the sweetie. Responded to a wanted on Freecycle from someone wanting computers for "homework" heh. Hopefully he'll take the three working computers and any other bits and pieces that he might find useful. So spent the evening sorting all the computer crap into piles to give away and piles to keep, and wiping hard drives.

The back yard is a disaster. We have this very vigorous plantage at the side fence that is taking over. Even if we chop it back, we'll have piles and piles of vegetation to get rid of. Not entirely sure how to go about doing that. Heck even with a green waste bin it'd be a challenge. Might have to revisit the idea of a gardener...

Video Night!

Last night a couple of Daves, a Neil, a Steve and a Simon came over for a video night. We'd planned the night for a date which Neil and I were not on call. But alas, the person who was meant to do on call had a great fall (we're calling him Humpty now) and I ended up with it :(

But anyway.

We watched Johnny Mnemonic first up. Not a bad movie (based on a story by William Gibson) but the acting was *terrible*!! It was quite painful to watch heh.

Then we watched This is Spinal Tap, which I'd never seen before. It was pretty funny.

We ordered six Encore pizzas which were demolished in short order, and an *awful lot* of beer was drunk. Considering two people were driving, there must have been a couple of people that drunk *a lot* of beer.. heh

Good times :)

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