The Queens gets older, so Oz takes a holiday.

For those of you who don’t know, Australia is still a colony of Britain. So even though she barely matters in Oz at this point, they still respect her enough in Australia to make a holiday out of her birthday.

Except it’s not really her birthday, it’s just the Monday that’s closest to her birthday. To make it a long weekend. Because, really, who wants to take a Wednesday off? What good does that do anyone?

My new expat friends were taking a road trip to wine country and invited me along. Yes please.

It was quite the international crew. My friend Jorge (American/Latino), his Aussie girlfriend Renee, Vincent from Singapore and I piled into a car to stay with three of Jorge’s friends from Turkey. Talk about an international buffet.

The Turks are here working at a stud farm a few hours north of Sydney, so they have a pretty big house near the stables that they share. It was super cozy and relaxing. We ate a lot, drank a ton, attempted to ride an ex-racehorse, visited wineries and local drinking holes and generally had a great time.

Did I mention that there was a lot of really great wine involved?

We got in fairly late on Friday after hitting traffic and making sure to eat dinner in the equivalent of a Aussie greasy spoon diner.

I tried a chicken schnitzel, which I’ve seen offered everywhere here. It’s essentially a steak fried chicken, very flat and breaded and fried. With gravy and potatoes and veggie. Country style for sure.

Oh, and this diner had the smallest, most ghetto ATM machine I’ve ever seen. So we took a pic. (see above)

After a few glasses of wine and some introductions, we settled into the cozy country house and got lazy. Excellent.

The next morning we tried to ride Bill. He wasn’t in the mood and nearly threw each and every one of us off. I managed to stay on, but only barely.

We rode with jockey saddles, which means no horn to hold on to. So when Big Bill got a little feisty, I had to hold on with my legs. Ohhh wee. I was sore for days after only a few minutes on this guy.

At 3 we decided it was time to start drinking. So we went to the bar and watched horse races on TV.

On day 2 we hit up some wineries in the area. Yum.

On Monday we hit up the more famous Hunter Valley wineries on our way back to town. I wasn’t that impressed with many of them. We almost headed straight back when Renee saw the sign for Petersons.

This ended up being the winery that made the entire trip. Katherine, our lovely hostess, was awesome and let us try everything, and it was all delicious. I ended up finally buying a bottle of shiraz, even though it was 50 bucks, because it was just that delicious and she was just that fabulous.

She gave me a ton of Peterson’s stickers too, so that’s something.

It was a fab Aussie weekend.

Happy Birthday, Your Majesty.