Tradition has it that we attend a ‘nice’ restaurant as part of both our birthday celebrations and more recently tradition dictates that we stay somewhere ‘nice’ also. If you want to be even more acurate you could transpose ‘nice’ with ‘expensive’.
The celebrations were in two parts.
Part One was a ‘nice’ meal out at Mount Lofty House. It’s a boutique hotel just a kilometre up the road from where I work - but we didn’t let that put us off. We had a lovely meal. If it had been daytime we would have had the most magnificent views across Piccadilly Valley but as it was night time we saw, well, not much. The food was glorious.
The following weekend (Part Two) we went to Thorn Park Country House, a traditionally hosted B&B in the Clare Valley. Our hosts were David and Michael and the main house is just gorgeous - blue stone and sandstone, filled with antiques and glorious. But we stayed in the barn. No not on a bale of hay and with cattle lowing all night. It had been converted into a rather lovely self-contained unit. And even though we were pariahs from the Barn we could have full run of the ‘House’. We dined with all the other guests both nights which was great. A few too many lawyers though.
We cycled around the valley on the Saturday and visited a winery and sat on the Salt ‘n’ Vines Restaurant deck in the marvellously warming sun in the afternoon. Pure bliss-o-rama.
Photos (which, if you click on them will miraculously display larger in a new window, press the back button to get back to the blog) include a beautiful dusky rose next to the Gatekeeper’s Cottage, parrots in the trees, the nearly finished wisteria in front of the main house, the windmill in the paddock nearby and the barn with our bikes on the verandah under the Banksia rose.
