The Olympic Park and Hunter Wine Valley...

Nigel has really wanted to see where the Sydney 2000 Olympic site was since we arrived in Australia so we decided to head out of town to see it. The stadium we pictured was called the Telstra Stadium the last time I was here but has changed sponsorship since and is now the ANZ (bank) stadium. We had a look around and it was pretty quiet for a week day but apparently the space gets used quite a bit still for athletes and sporting events. Nigel was really excited about a tour around the stadium so he decided to go and have a look around. I favoured a peek around the area used for the equestrian events and headed for the stables. No horses there of course. He seemed to have a really good time and was excited about being able to have his picture taken on the podium! Nigel Mintern wins gold for England!!!



We also had a look around some of the other stadiums and past the aquatics centre. We were told that we could go and have a look at the evening training session for some of the athletes, which we did, I think we were both quite envious about their levels of fitness and dedication in the heat! We also found out that there is a massive park further up from the Olympic site which is huge in itself and far too much to walk. We are going to come back and next time hire some bikes and ride along the bike tracks along the river, it looks really pretty. Anyway we have posted some pictures for you to have a look at.











We also took our first proper tour since arriving in Australia this week. An of course it was the Hunter Wine Valley tour!! We travelled 2 hours to one of the best wine making districts there is and we were ready to taste! There were only 6 people on our trip, one lady visiting her daughter who lives here, a guy from California and a father and son from Denmark. They were all very nice and we had a nice day with them. Our tour guide Shane was very good and had a story for everything and a poor joke to back it up! He took us to three vineyards and got us suitably drunk along the way... we also stopped to try some bread and dips, Nigel wasn't looking very carefully at the labels and dived straight in only to spend the next 5 minutes acting as if some one had just poisoned him! Very embarrassing... he also did the same thing at the cheese tasting that we went to...can't take that boy anywhere!! The only downside to the day was the weather, we had tropical rain showers on and off all day and got soaked at lunch time...you can see my efforts to try and dry off my clothes in the afternoon! We managed to restrict ourselves to just one souviener bottle of Moscato that we couldn't live without it was delicious! We had a really nice day despite the weather and returned back to the hostel exhausted from our days efforts.


Sorry...did I forget to mention that we are in Australia and this is not the weather we paid for! Has rained all weekend too... our tennis game got rained off court and the football was cancelled as after three hours of heavy rain the pitch looked more like a swimming pool! It has only ever been cancelled once in its history of playing!!! We did go out for a really nice curry though.