Jan 18 - Down Peninsula Way

  This morning after breakfast, Mr Smart and I headed down to the post office to pick up a package I had missed during the week.  It was three new SD memory cards that I had ordered online from Dick Smith thanks to a bargain price tip off from Mr Smart and ozbargain.com.  After collecting the package we headed off to Baker's Delight, then the greengrocer and finally Coles, to collect goods for a Mornington Peninsula picnic.  We figured a picnic would be a less expensive alternative to eating somehwhere down there.
  We returned home and collected Gub and the Cambridge Rower and set off down to the newly opened Peninsula Link!  It was a fun novelty to get to drive on a brand new freeway on its very first day in use.  It looks good and has some interesting sound block walls covered in the names of the surrounding suburbs and some fabulous sculptures.  My favourite was an enormous ram's skull done in iron.
  We hopped off in Mornington and made our way through to Red Hill.   We stopped at a likely winery and found a picnic table.  Perfect, we thought, and went and sat down and opened up our basket of goodies and began eating and talking, fully intended to go and enjoy a wine tasting afterwards, until that is, a member of staff approached us and told us we'd have to leave as we were on private property (no shit Sherlock) and that picnicing was not allowed.  Picnicing not allowed?  With a picnic table sitting right there?
  It turns out that the winery leases the garden area and restaurant to an external restauranteur and they understandably don't take kindly to people bringing their own food and eating it on land they lease.  Understandable yes, but we'd be damned if we were going to taste their wine now, let alone buy any!  He handled the situation really badly and why not have a sign up that says 'No Picnicing'?  We would've gone somewhere else had that been the case.  However, we were asked to leave and they were within their rights to do so, so we packed up and moved on.
  We came next to Ashcombe Maze, a place I'd been wanting to visit and it intrigued the others as well.  We parked and Gub went ahead to scout out prices and such.  She came out shaking her head "no picnics here either" but she went on to explain that the girl at the counter had been very helpful and given us directions to the nearest picnic table in Shoreham and said we were most welcome to return to do the mazes after lunch.

  We journeyeddown the road to the grounds of the Shoreham Tennis Club and recommenced our lunch.  It was fairly breezy by this point in the day so we had to keep securing bits of lunch and related rubbish that kept trying to fly away.  After lunch, the Cambridge Rower had a little play on the playground as Mr Smart watched.  He got so high on the swing he was at right angles to the support beam!

  After finishing lunch, we tidied away our rubbish and packed everything back into the car and headed back to Ashcombe Maze.  We entered the gardens and found the first maze and the fun began!  Gub and the Cambridge Rower insisted that getting through the mazes should be a competition so off we went into the South Maze.  Though Mr Smart and I valiantly tried, successfully collecting photographic evidence of each mosiac corner tile, somehow Gub and the Cambridge Rower still beat us out to the centre garden!

  The fun continued in the North Maze.  It was supposed to be more difficult than the first one but Mr Smart and I were not about to lose twice!  So while Gub and the Cambridge Rower were debating which entrance to take, we ran back and entered the maze, completing it at a run!  I'm so glad I have lost all that weight because I'm quite certain I've not run that fast for years.  We got out just seconds before them!
  We went on exploring the gardens and completed the third maze.  I'll be gracious here and call the third a draw.  The objective was to get to the centre of the Rose Maze and then out again.  Gub and the Cambridge Rower got to the centre first but then apparently forgot about the getting back out again.  We tricked them into having their photo taken in the centre, and then we bolted!  So we made it out first, but they made it in first.

  After all the mazes were done and the grounds had been thoroughly explored, we headed back to the cafe to have a small pitstop before we continued on.  We were very lucky that we did as it was hear that Gub spotted a wild koala in the tree above the rest rooms!  Everyone was very chuffed at having seen it and a small crowd of other patrons gathered around to catch a glimpse of him too.
  Happy with our maze adventure, we headed off in search of some of the Peninsula's cheese, beer or wine and lucky for me, cheese was first.
   We grabbed a five dollar tasting plate to share between three.  Gub is not a huge cheese fan so she was designated official cheese splitter, carefully cutting each piece into three for us.  The plate is designed to be started at the mildest flavour and then you work your way around clockwise to the strongest, with a piece of plain wafer between each taste to cleanse the palette.

 
  The favourite for all was the Point Nepean with cumin, described as a robust and savoury goat's milk semi-hard cheese.  Mr Smart bought two pieces of the Point Nepean, one for each of us, and a piece of the Venus Blue for Mr Smart Snr.  Their cheeses are certainly not cheap though.. those two were $75/kg and $85/kg respectively and they don't redeem the cost of the tasting plate from the purchase price which would perhaps be something good for them to consider.  After our cheese tasting it was well into the afternoon and everyone was starting to feel a bit sleepy, so in the end we did no beer or wine tastings for the whole day.  We still had a lot of fun though.
  We got home and soon Mr Smart needed to head off for boys night with Mr Masterchef.  Despite my best attempts to get him to stay, his mind was made up and off he went leaving me to go for a walk with Gub, eat a lovely dinner with Gub and the Cambridge Rower and write up yesterday's blog.

  Today's food and exercise were:

• Breakfast was a small serve of saganaki with fresh lemon juice.
• Lunch was a picnic in Shoreham containing, olive mortadella, pastrami, mild sopressa, smoked salmon, a Baker's Delight pipe loaf sliced for sandwich, vegetable sticks (carrot, cucumber, snow peas and broccolini), Vita-Weat multigrain rice crackers and three dips (Black Swan roasted garlic hommus, Wattle Valley Delish peppersweet and feta and Wattle Valley Chunky beetroot with cashew and parmesan).
• Afternoon snack was a cheese tasting plate at Red Hill Cheese, see description above.
• Exercise was a lot of running around in mazes and gardens and a 35 minute, 2.9 km walk around my neighbourhood with Gub.
• Dinner was four half slices of crusty bread, green salad, two hard-boiled eggs, pesto pasta salad, four Thai-style prawns, and a spoonful each of salmon and eggplant dips.
• Dessert was four very small pieces of a Mars Honeycomb Bar.  Not so much 'honeycomb' as it was, mildly honey-flavoured nougat dyed a vivid yellow in an otherwise completely normal Mars Bar.

  Once I finished the blog I did headed to bed with my kindle.  Halfway through reading, my kindle blooped that it needed its battery charged.  The first time since I started reading on it so I'm pretty impressed with its battery life.  I could of course, have stopped reading and gone to sleep, as it was already past midnight, but no... I was in a good bit!  So I turned on my laptop, placing it under my bed, plugged in the kindle to charge, and went right on reading!
  Jess