Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

Up at 4.00am, the miracles of release meeting calls. Discussed several things, and got some stuff done and decided - good. Pain in neck worse - sigh. More sleep.
Up later; breakfast & off to Thrifty car rental. Set off for the Hunter valley.
A chunk of driving - we went via a scenic detour, but the main road had a certain rugged beauty (to an Engineer) - a huge amount of the road had been carved through the solid rock to an amazing depth. The road being ~3 lanes each way, had a ~ 2 meter wide rock wall of varying height - 3m up to 6-8m in the middle to separate the traffic that had simply not been removed. Amazingly where a road would branch off - they would quite happily do this in the middle of an extremely deep cutting ~ 20m or so, leaving a vast triangular island of rock in the middle of the road - often with trees growing on top. In some places the bridges across the road - intead of having a central resevation pillar - simply rested on the unremoved rock in the middle.
More than that - it was clear that some of the strata in the rock were particularly weak - perhaps sand or shingle, and these strata were noticable since they had been concreted over to ensure the (extremely steep ~ 75degrees) sides didn't subside - similarly great inch wide score marks down the rock seemed to indicate some giant clawing machine used to slice through - fun.
We took a detour to Cessnock, via. a large dam which was rather interesting, it had a capacity of 30% of Sydney harbour, with the capability to expand that to 100% in future - which says a lot about the Australian approach to infastructure provision. Looking out over it we saw a huge ~ 5ft long lizard - initialy, seeing only the tail whipping up the tree I thought it was a snake - but, then it stopped and stood still. Beautiful yellow stripes, a forked tounge and an inquisitive look.
On to an amateur observatory further along the road - determined that it was a somewhat small place, and midday not a good time for star-gazing and moved on. The chap had an interesting statistic about the ratio of beaurocrats to general populous; must find out what it is in the UK.
By now pretty hungry, studied the Hunter valley guide to restaurants - unimpressed by most of them although Mc Donalds was billed as FIXME - headed for 'Amandas on the edge' at the end of an unmetled road. Sat and eat in almost total peace ( most people were out voting for John Howard it seems ), with bubbling water nearby, looking out over a vineyard. Had an extremely sumptious 3 course meal - fantastic creme broule, some of their own wine, complimentary (sweet & fruity) port - 35 UKP for both of us, wow.
Headed on to another place at the end of the track, tasted some wine, wandered around their pretty show garden, and to a larger place to try and get some port. Got a nice tawny, but couldn't find the sweet fruity thing, hey ho.
Back... via. lake Maquarie ( everything is called Mcquarie in Australia, banks, lakes, bridges, hotels, hospitals, animals, children, fish, rocks, - etc. ).
Got home, eat, bed.

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Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

2001-11-10: Saturday