Michel had suggested Sunday lunch on the deck of Gapsted Winery. Their website does a much more comprehensive job of explaining what’s what than I could here, so go look. Suffice to say that they make “cool climate” wines in…

Time to be escorted again. In Stanley, at about 750m elevation, we are already in the high country but Michel had designs to take us up into the really high country. We were heading over 1500m to Mount Buffalo. The…

For the last couple of days we have at last been joined in Stanley by Francine’s sister-in-law, Sandrine, who has hitherto been otherwise occupied in Sydney. We’ve had a hoot re-educating her to drink wine instead of fermented tea which…

We’re braving a day further afield by ourselves. As we drove in from Melbourne airport along the Hume Freeway, we past an area called the Winton Wetlands, “a wetlands restoration project of national significance” [it says here]. Places with wetland…

It does rain in Australia. Today we’ve got clouds and occasional rain, some of it quite heavy. Still, we are in Victoria’s high country and it is early spring. Michel said he’d distract us with a guided tour. 40 kms…

Yackandandah is a nearby 1-street town, another historic gold mining village with a quaint western feel. We were out unescorted for the first time. Scary stuff. We found a place to abandon our rental ship and wandered up and down…

We are based in Stanley, Vic. Stanley is a small village containing what we’d think of as a village store and a pub (apparently with a less than jovial barman). The nearest town to source supplies is Beechworth, about 10kms…

We touched down approaching 10:00 on a fine, sunny morning after our 9-hour overnight flight from Hong Kong. Amazingly, I seemed to have managed to sleep a little. This is just as well since there was a 3-hour drive ahead…