Summer 2018 big trip - day 2

Sunday 29th July

After going to bed at 8pm the night before, I woke up at 7am to fog outside and peace and quiet. I actually decided to do a few minutes of exercise and some simple yoga stretches, which was nice. (I'd quite like to do that every morning, at home, but am forgetful, lazy and don't want to wake people up by jogging on the spot and doing starjumps on the second floor at 6:30am, so haven't made an effort to make it a habit.)

Mid-morning after everyone had woken up and breakfasted we went to Granite Gorge, which is what it says on the tin. It's a nature reserve with a couple of walking trails where you can see and feed wild rock wallabies. It quickly gets hot, walking up and down and over these bare granite rocks in the strong sun, but it's a cool place.

After that we drove to Coffee Works for lunch. It's a coffee producer, with a shop selling coffee beans and special blends and coffee liqueurs and other such stuff. You walk in to the most wonderful smell! I don't like coffee but do like the smell. There's also a chocolate shop and a cafe, where in typical Australian fashion it was all open but under cover, so it was nice and cool and airy. I had a spiced pulled lamb burger with sriracha mayo and salad. Yum! Messy though, haha. The cakes and gelato (macadamia and caramel!) looked great too but we were full up after the mains and still had the lemon squares to eat. We went for a look in the chocolate shop before leaving and I bought a bar of cranberry and pistachio milk chocolate.

We went to Golden Drop Mango Winery next. It's a warehouse on a huge, immaculately-kept mango plantation. It was Sunday so the winery wasn't in production mode, but we could go to the little tasting room and shop. We tasted dry, medium and sweet mango wines, sparkling mango wine, mango port, mango 'cello' (liqueur, like limoncello), and mandarin and dragonfruit cellos. All were nice, especially the mandarin cello, but I didn't buy any because I don't really drink so knew most of it would go to waste.

From there we went to visit my aunt's friends in a nearby town. They're lovely people, and are looking after three orphaned baby wallabies at the moment, so my sister and I got to bottle-feed a couple! The one my sister had was a bit more lively and sociable, but mine was very shy and didn't put her head out of the little sack at all. Apparently she was very comfortable though, as she hasn't really let anyone have her for that amount of time - she stayed on my lap in the sack for ages after finishing feeding. We'd brought the lemon bars with us and ate most of them there with my aunt's friends.

After that it was back to the house, relax, dinner and a slightly later but still early night.