Since leaving Rutherglen mobile reception has been patchy. We decided to drive via another wine region known as the Pyrenees. In fact, I reckon it would take a large amount of navigational skill to actually miss a wine region driving through Victoria. We stayed at a little winery called Summerfield which had the winning combination of excellent wine and accommodation. We arrived quite late as a result of a series of blocked roads due to the first lot of heavy rain that has since caused some major floods around central and western Victoria and have been jostling for news headline attention with Queensland.
We had a nice night at Summerfield, it's in a small town called Moonambel which doesn't offer much else in the way of tourist activities except the pub of course. We had a taste of some wines as we checked out, again shiraz was the grape of the moment. And it was probably the shiraz of the trip so far but that's actually a claim that's hard to back up because they're all so different region to region. But still this had flavours in all the right places of my mouth and it had the smoothness of a much older wine, I guess it's what people mean when they say a wine is 'well rounded' maybe... anyway it was delicious so we bought some.
However, as Mark, the winemaker, had warned us there was more water on the road from rain over night and so we had to choose our next destination carefully. Our choices were to either go directly to Coonawarra which woud mean a 4+ hour drive, or stop at the Grampians and take it easy for the afternoon. Mount Langhi has a their 'The Gap' winery near Hall's Gap afterall. So Hall's Gap it was: population 300; gateway to the Grampians; popular holiday destination for Melbournians; and, only since we arrived, the other place that's flooding.
Not the best photograph and it's not quite an inland tsunami but this creek was raging and even browsed a few shops in Hall's Gap.
We arrived at the local servo to see a group of sandbagging locals 'banding together' just like the news says they do. Stoney Creek runs through the town centre and had started rise up and threaten the shops. They ended up copping about 3 inches of water. We stayed at the Grampian Views holiday park and went down to the pub later that evening. It was truly hilarious to watch the locals watch themselves on the local news 'banding together' and make remarks about different people who were both on screen and in the pub. "The sandbags add ten pounds!" apparently.
So the next morning we started out on our way to Coonawarra only to be greeted by yet more water on the road. And this was the case in all directions in fact. So we're currently stuck in Hall's Gap but it's a lovely day. We've had a couple of jugs of beer and games of pool at the pub and we've returned to our accommodation from last night and we currently have the place to ourselves because nobody can get in or out, which is odd because we heard on the radio that Hall's Gap had been evacuated - we would have liked to have been evacuated ourselves but nobody asked, and I don't know where these evacuees would have gone anyway? We've been told we can't drink the town water but we're stocked up with wine and we have enough food til tomorrow (and longer if we need it) when hopefully the brooks go back to their picturesque babbling selves.
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