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The wedding; no *you’re* a valley

We’re heading out of Melbourne to the Yarra Valley. It’s wine country with vineyards of various sizes, from the very small to the quite large, about an hour outside of Melbourne. I was surprised on the drive quite how quickly the place transitions from urban to rural, I think I’ve had that thought in Australia previously too.

We’re staying at some accommodation attached to a winery, very nice and very big rooms in a row of cabins. We get there about 1pm and get checked in. We got one of the few rooms with a spa which we were pretty happy with; sorry Raam!
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Some nice scenery around.
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The wedding was at 4.30 at a different winery, so at 3.45 we were all ironed, suited and booted and got transferred to the venue by bus. I didn’t get the back seat, my day was ruined.

Have some ceremony picture! As you can see the weather was awesome.
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Music!

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That bit didn’t take long, then the free sparkling wine started flowing and we did some milling and picture taking and canapĂ©-eating before dinner.

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I'm respectable...
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...oh yes, very classy!

Time to sit. The gifts from the married couple were little pots of different types of jam, pretty happy with that! They spelled my name wrong though, maybe sometime soon I’ll forgive them for that…
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Erin was there:
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Unfortunately I forgot to take pictures of the starters and mains! They were delicious, though, I remember that much.

There were some speeches; obviously Jimmy had a laptop to help:
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Someone spotted a kangaroo on the hill, of course every foreigner at the table leaped into action!
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Raam, and then Reece, went on a mission. They somehow managed to not die from either angry kangaroos or snakes.
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The meal was over and dancing started. Little bit disappointed that there was no dessert but fair enough.

Sunset was nice.

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Time to cut the cake! Both Nick and Kate are much more into savoury than sweet, and especially cheese, therefore cheesecake! That is, actual cheese, stacked up. I definitely like my sweet stuff, and would always have cheese before rather than after dinner, but quite clever and very fitting for those guys!
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Then, surprise! Dessert does exist! Lemon meringue pie, creme brulé. The meringue definitely won this round, just look at that thing. Yes, of course I ate all of it.
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Someone beheaded this one, a travesty:
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Reece is doing… something?
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At about 10.30 the buses returned to bring us back to where we were staying. A bunch of people carried on the fun well into the night but we were quite tired; bedtime for us like the old people we are!

I went for a run early the next morning, it was a nice morning to be out – not too hot yet, for a start! I really wasn’t impressed by the pointlessly-steep hill right outside the gate, though. Oh well, I didn’t die.
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I recovered from the run in the spa, it seemed like the right way to do things. Verrrry nice, although now of course Erin wants one. The rest of the morning was nice and lazy while waiting for the rest of the group to emerge. There were definitely some impressive hangovers on display.

At 11.00 we descended en masse onto the restaurant where brunch had been organised, stomach indicating that it was definitely ready to eat. It took a while (unsurprisingly, there were ~30 of us) but we were soon presented with some excellent food. I went for the pasta with prawns, Erin got the BLT along with most of the table – hungover people like their bacon! I was happy I bucked the trend, though, the pasta was very good and I’m not hugely into bread anyway. The chips were also delicious; thick and crispy.
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After brunch it was time for the main activity of the day: a wine-tasting tour! Three wineries in the area over a few hours, plenty of wine to sample in all three with some fruit/cheese/dip platters at the last just in case we needed solid sustenance.
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I’d never been at a wine tasting before so I was quite interested in how it all worked. It was a really fun afternoon but to be honest I was a little disappointed that it wasn’t a bit more guided than it was; the first two wineries we went to basically put a bunch of bottles on the counter and allowed us to try whatever we wanted. At least in the first one the guy doing the serving made a token effort to tell us what we should expect from each, but the second was just two servers behind the bar, pouring. The third place was much better, though, they did one wine at a time and explained stuff about each one – more what I was expecting initially.

All that said, it was still quite a lot of fun! There were some wines (especially the fortifieds) that I really liked, but I decided not to buy any in the end – I’m not enough of a wine drinker that I felt it was justified to buy here and bring back home. In the third place they also had some miscellaneous wine-fortified products to try, though, and we bought the wine-infused wholegrain mustard; it tasted really good with a delayed kick that blew my nose off. Perfect!

We got back to the accommodation around 5.30, I played some cards with a few people while grazing on some more platters of various foody bits – as I tend to do!

There were plans for a barbecue a bit later but at this point I was feeling a bit over-peopled – there had been quite a lot of socialising over the last few days and I have a definite limit for how much of that I can take. I went back to our room for the evening and spent a few hours watching American Football and reading. Just what I needed, and far better than attempting to continue social interaction while getting grumpy! I missed out on the barbecue but I’m pretty sure I’ve eaten enough recently anyway.

Sunset was nice again!
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Next morning, Sunday, we were up early to get a taxi to the train station. We had arranged the pickup with a woman from a winery just down the road; amusingly she kinda forgot about us until I called her to see what was going on, but we weren’t in a rush anyway so it didn’t matter! Twenty minute trip to the station and then we were on the train back towards Melbourne.


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