Dinner Menu Day 2 - Aldi all-beef sausages and rice pudding with caramelized apples.[Chris]
The Sydney suburbs had slowly turned to natural beauty up the pacific coast highway. When we got on to smaller scenic route we stopped at a fruit shack for peaches. The farmer suggested we avoid the tourist trail to hunter valley and head 'out the back', meaning the north coast back country.
The brisk ocean breeze hit our faces along with misty rain after our first night in the ‘Jackaroo‘ tent. It was time to get on with our mission - finding work to make ends meet. We quickly packed up under the persistent rain and plugged some hunter valley vineyard towns into the GPS. We followed a long-standing Zimmerman tradition of naming the GPS (Gloria in the US and Courtenay in France). Our faithful Australian navigator has now been named Tallulah.
When we finally took an exit off pacific highway 1, an old man at a fruit stand pointed us down a the local roads for finding work. He said it would only take another hour to get 'out the back', as he kept referring to the scenic backcountry. After some chit chat on how those Sydney city slickers spend and burn big money, we were off again.
Now this was when we really hit the open road. It would be our first dirt road (many more to come) and it was actually a convict trail, from the old penal colony days. The trail winded through arid mountains to little towns with one general store and pub each. What a great drive. After passing a few koala bear road signs, no sooner did a young kangaroo hop across the road right in front of us!
Steph is hoping to find a place to learn to ride horses during our travels. This project may have to wait until the ranches of South America - since the horse farm we found was the largest in Australia, and almost a hundred dollars per hour lesson.
And so we approached the famous Hunter Valley. Our search for wineries small to large in the lower Hunter Valley began with a few 50-acre family-run vineyards and went all the way up to the large-scale production of Tyrrell's and Lindemans. The small guys could offer casual labour for a week, probably taking us on as volunteers. The large ones took on picking teams in armies by the hundreds for a regulated wage of $19 an hour. Our pre-harvest timing was perfect. We just needed to get on the list in the last few weeks when the winemakers taste the grape to decide if they are ready. With weeks of unseasonable cold rain in New South Wales, they are banking on a few hot weeks of sun at the very end. If more rain comes in, they will all forego the standard harvest period and pick everything as quickly as possible to avoid soil rot, and will need all the help they can get.
We may have applied to a dozen mostly large-scale vineyards by the time they all closed at 5pm. There was one private campsite in town that offered us a pitch for 30 dollars between their row of grape vines. The only problem was that this is still too expensive and we really did not need the luxuries of a laundry room and swimming pool on day two of our camping adventure. After a few laps and setting up the camp stove, Steph seemed to have taken over an hour in the shower. It turned out she met a friendly Australian woman named ‘Di‘. Now Di informed us that actually many of the campsites in Australia are free! She followed Steph back to where I was cooking up the sausages and pointed us in the direction of the Tourist office that could give us some national park and road maps. This was fantastic news and indeed the vast national park network would soon offer us more camping options than we have ever seen in our lives!!
The brisk ocean breeze hit our faces along with misty rain after our first night in the ‘Jackaroo‘ tent. It was time to get on with our mission - finding work to make ends meet. We quickly packed up under the persistent rain and plugged some hunter valley vineyard towns into the GPS. We followed a long-standing Zimmerman tradition of naming the GPS (Gloria in the US and Courtenay in France). Our faithful Australian navigator has now been named Tallulah.
When we finally took an exit off pacific highway 1, an old man at a fruit stand pointed us down a the local roads for finding work. He said it would only take another hour to get 'out the back', as he kept referring to the scenic backcountry. After some chit chat on how those Sydney city slickers spend and burn big money, we were off again.
Now this was when we really hit the open road. It would be our first dirt road (many more to come) and it was actually a convict trail, from the old penal colony days. The trail winded through arid mountains to little towns with one general store and pub each. What a great drive. After passing a few koala bear road signs, no sooner did a young kangaroo hop across the road right in front of us!
Steph is hoping to find a place to learn to ride horses during our travels. This project may have to wait until the ranches of South America - since the horse farm we found was the largest in Australia, and almost a hundred dollars per hour lesson.
And so we approached the famous Hunter Valley. Our search for wineries small to large in the lower Hunter Valley began with a few 50-acre family-run vineyards and went all the way up to the large-scale production of Tyrrell's and Lindemans. The small guys could offer casual labour for a week, probably taking us on as volunteers. The large ones took on picking teams in armies by the hundreds for a regulated wage of $19 an hour. Our pre-harvest timing was perfect. We just needed to get on the list in the last few weeks when the winemakers taste the grape to decide if they are ready. With weeks of unseasonable cold rain in New South Wales, they are banking on a few hot weeks of sun at the very end. If more rain comes in, they will all forego the standard harvest period and pick everything as quickly as possible to avoid soil rot, and will need all the help they can get.
We may have applied to a dozen mostly large-scale vineyards by the time they all closed at 5pm. There was one private campsite in town that offered us a pitch for 30 dollars between their row of grape vines. The only problem was that this is still too expensive and we really did not need the luxuries of a laundry room and swimming pool on day two of our camping adventure. After a few laps and setting up the camp stove, Steph seemed to have taken over an hour in the shower. It turned out she met a friendly Australian woman named ‘Di‘. Now Di informed us that actually many of the campsites in Australia are free! She followed Steph back to where I was cooking up the sausages and pointed us in the direction of the Tourist office that could give us some national park and road maps. This was fantastic news and indeed the vast national park network would soon offer us more camping options than we have ever seen in our lives!!
Research from the Business Lounge
Our New Years' Eve Adventure: Before arriving in Sydney we made arrangements to watch the fireworks on a boat in Sydney Harbour. The outing was organized by a group of 150 Australians of Lebanese descent. The organizers sold tickets to a few others – including the four of us – to fill up the boat. 
I found it incredibly sad that Utzon never even returned to see the completed Sydney Opera House in his whole lifetime. Imagine, first of all winning a design competition for a new national symbol of culture for Australia; fllowing it through with the plans, seeing it being built, and then having to leave the project for good. It's incredibly sad and I'm surprised that Utzon was convinced to reconciliate and work on the Opera House again in 1999, working on a set of design principles as a guide for all future changes to the building. Even this wouldn't bring him back to Sydney to see his creation though: he remained in Denmark and worked from there.
