It probably wasn’t a good idea to book in for a sleep study on the night before driving to Canberra. I have been feeling a little fatigued lately and a part of the analysis is to see how well I am sleeping. It was a little hard to sleep with so many wires attached to various parts of my body, but I think that I might have slept for long enough to get a good sample of my sleep pattern.
A few months ago, we had gone to Canberra to see the Turner Exhibition at the National Gallery. I booked our return flights for the wrong day, so we still have a couple of plane tickets to use. We thought that we could take a couple of days of driving a rental car back to Canberra via the Snowy Mountains and take advantage of our unused ticket.
It’s rather nice to travel on a weekday. Very few people at many places and lots more time to potter around. We stopped at Morris Winery at Milawa and tried some of the products. I haven’t really drunk much Tempranillo ( a Spanish variety of red wine) before so I learned something new. There weren’t many other people there at all, but I was reminded of a previous visit – perhaps 15 years ago – when a busload of little old ladies turned up there. One asked to taste the Blackberry Nip and then wanted to know if the winery had anything sweeter!
From there, we travelled on to the old gold mining town of Beechworth. We have been there a few times over recent years, but there is always something interesting to see in some of the cute little shops in the town. It has a great streetscape.
We travelled on to Albury for an overnight stop. We decided to make this an easy, low stress, drive so we are covering only short distances each day. Our day concluded with dinner in the hotel restaurant and by the time that we finished our meal, we were the last customers. We started chatting to to the musician in the restaurant, a very good local guitarist named Peter Cominos. He had an excellent range of songs and we had our own floor show for a couple of hours. He played requests, suggested some songs and eventually one song just led to another, and then another. Songs from the Shadows, Eric Clapton, Elvis and many movie themes all rolled on one after another. He’s playing at the Beechworht Bakery this morning, but unfortunately we have to drive on to Jindanyne. This little encounter just reminded me that the best thing about travel is the people that you meet.
