Winifred Wilson's Exciting Adventures in Space

It’s not every day you wake to someone cooking your breakfast. It’s certainly not every day you wake to one of your travel companions cooking you breakfast. But that is exactly what I woke to on Monday morning. This is certainly no bad thing as Monday and I are known to not be on speaking terms. By the time I had showered, Mal had prepared a pretty sweet spread for the three of us, including mushrooms, ham, scrambled eggs and tomatoes which we promptly devoured!

Local ingredients used to make an awesome breakfast, thanks Mal!
Photo credit: Alison Young

We didn’t want to leave Crystal Creek at all, however check out time was approaching and we still needed to shoot some video and take some photos of the place! Luckily, Alison had been wandering about the gardens and bumped into Sophie who was happy for us to take a little longer to get all packed up to head off so that we could continue filming and photographing the place. She was even kind enough to allow us to look through one of the couples-only cottages. These are just as beautiful as our cottage and definitely make the sexy weekend list!

Once again, we got to drive the awesome road through the mountains to head back to Berry. This is such a fantastic road, but this time we decided to stop at the Fudge stand we saw yesterday! At the top of the mountain is a fridge filled with fudge for our eating pleasure! Naturally, we all brought some fudge (and yes, we were honest!) and left a little note in the visitors book. I really loved the visitors book idea, there was a very cool comments – one from Argentina really stood out to us all as the lady writing it had mentioned that this idea would be impossible in her home land. Really cute and reminds you which part of Australia you are in now.

The fudge fridge - the fudge from this was delicious.
Photo credit: Alison Young

Onward we drove! Another exciting journey through the mountain roads on New South Wales and we arrive back on level ground, headed towards Berry. Berry is a cool little town with a pub literally COVERED in canoes! The whole thing! Roof, verandahs, everywhere! It’s quite an awesome site. Anyhow, we were here to try the sourdough from the Berry Sourdough Bakery, so off we went in search of it. When we got there, we remembered that it is Monday – the country weekend, so the place was closed. Luckily, Chris has told us about The Treat Factory which was around the corner. This is the place that produces all the (complimentary!) chocolate for Crystal Creek, so we were excited to visit the place.

The Treat Factory has an awesome lot of Jams, Relishes and such, totally work a visit!
Photo credit: Alison Young

We poked around the offerings here for a bit before a huge bus load of adorable old ladies arrived. Watching these ladies was like watching a room full of young kids run around being excited at all the different types of lollies and chocolate that The Treat Factory has to offer. These ladies where a real highlight to the day because they were just so damned cute! As they busied themselves selecting all their fantastic sugary treats (you know, so they can manipulate their grandchildren), we poked through the jams and honeys offered. The strangest one? Patersons Curse honey. Coming from a farm-boy background, this stuff is an absolutely pest and it really surprised me to see honey of it available! Naturally, I grabbed a tester pot of it, but haven’t tried this one yet.

These lovely ladies where like kids in a candy store - totally adorable.
Photo credit: Alison Young

Buy chocolate. Lots of it!

The Treat Factory really produces an impressive array of chocolates and lollies that you really need to get hold of. I brought a mix of a bunch of different chocolates from the cabinet and worked by way through them recently. My favourites were the amazing truffles, in particular the rum truffles. Certainly something I would recommend. You can also get loads of nut clusters and rocky road here, all of which are deliciously tasty! If you can time your visit to include old ladies, then you will get the real Treat Factory experience!

It was getting late and we still needed to make our way back home to Sydney tonight. As we left Berry, I shot a quick, cheeky message to Kate (@wollongong_nsw).

@teknetia: We don’t wanna go home yet. Can you house us a your place, @wollongong_nsw? We’re real good houseguests and we can cook! #S2MT

To our incredible surprise, Kate came back to us with:

@wollongong_nsw: @teknetia You guys want the roadtwip to last 4eva! If you’re serious about staying in Wollongong we’ll sort you some accommodation! #S2MT

How freaking awesome is Kate?! That’s right, cooler than your Mum and your Mum’s Mum! You can’t touch this girl, she rocks that hard! We hold a very special place in our memories of this trip for Kate and all the work she did to make us feel welcome.

We were all hungry so we headed down to the highly recommended Diggies (@diggies) for a late lunch. Diggies has a fantastic view of Wollongong’s North Beach as well as being very classy (Mal and I both approved of the font and layout of the menus!). Diggies was another place where the #welovethegong campaign was in full force, our waitress, upon finding out we have #welovethegong t-shirts wanted to know where they could be purchased for all the customers that kept asking for them. We were really impressed with this! Kate and the rest of the Wollongong Tourism staff have done an awesome job on this campaign and we saw it only a few days into being active, I can only imagine how much it has taken off now.

Diggies make an awesome lunch. Go here.
Photo credit: Alison Young

While we sat here, enjoying our meals and the amazing view, all three of our phones vibrated at the same time. We checked them out to be greeted with awesome news:

@wollongong_nsw: Hey @Alegrya @maldamkar @teknetia The guys at @NovotelNthBeach are putting you up in ocean view rooms + balcony for the night! #S2MT

How awesome was that?! Not only had Kate gone to the effort of getting us somewhere to throw ourselves for the night, she had secured amazing rooms in a gorgeous hotel with stunning ocean views of the harbour! We were quickly welcomed by the Novotel North Beach:

@novotelnthbeach: Hey @Alegrya @maldamkar @teknetia Looking forward to welcoming u 2 the hotel 2night. We hear u love the Gong almost as much as we do! #S2MT

To be honest here, we were all flabbergasted by this. We had never expected that we would receive such a warm welcome and be taken in by such awesome people all in response to a cheeky comment as we left Berry. We have many time and will continue to offer our enormous thanks to everyone on Wollongong for being so awesome. It’s certainly true that #welovethegong!

We headed up to the rooms and dropped all our gear (got to get those phones charging, kids!) and decided what we wanted to do for dinner. Earlier in the day, we had received a suggestion to visit Amigos Mexican (@Amigos_Mexican) for lunch, although they were only open for dinner. Amigos is the oldest Mexican restaurant in Australia, so of course this is the place we chose to go to! While chatting about this, we realised we needed to thank Kate properly, so we DM’d her and invited her to join us for dinner. We set a time for dinner and then went about getting ourselves ready.

Absolutely stunning view from the hotel over Wollongong
Photo credit: Alison Young

Kate was kind enough to pick us up from the hotel to go to Amigos (yay Kate! This means we can drink, thanks!). We met her in the hotel lobby in time to head on over to the restaurant, presenting her with a box of flowers to thank her for her hospitality over the road trip. On the way, we where updated onthe progress of how the #welovethegong campaign was going so fair for her (great, for anyone interested!). Just as we were walking up the street to the restaurant, I recievied this:

@Amigos_Mexican: @teknetia when you get to #Amigos_Mexican ask Katie at the front counter for a cocktail on the house

So I replied that we had just entered! We took our table and started looking through the amazing menu that Amigos offers. If there is a Mexican food that you want, they probably have it along with several variations! Amigos service is very friendly and very prompt! We were served our food in no time at all and all got to demolishing the fantastic offering in front of us. Just as we were finishing and preparing to be on our way, Katie (our waitress) popped over and said “I believe we owe you all a round of cocktails!” We were impressed at her detective work to find us (we had been all very inconspicuous on arrival!) and where promptly served 3 enormous Margarita’s and a Mexican Hot Chocolate (hey, Kate had to drive, give her a break!). These where fantastic, I can absolutely see myself visiting for the cocktails alone! But it wasn’t over yet, we where also treated to a fantastic sticky date pudding dessert to share. This was amazing and I am a big fan of sticky date, so it was a double win!

When Amigos say cocktails, they mean cocktails! This is serious business folks!
Photo credit: Alison Young

All of us stuffed to the brim and well and truly cared for, we headed back to the hotel to get some sleep. Not too much of course, we still had to be in Sydney in time for work the next day!