I had such a great time at Spring War last year, that I felt absolutely obliged to go again this year! 😛 Ms CindyLou came with me for a Thelma and Louise Girly Swot Road Trip. The drive down was great fun… we nattered all the way down there and never even threw on a single CD. Ms CL is one of the few females of my acquaintance that I can handle taking a 10 hour road trip with. Friday night we got there and had an equipment issue (the last person to use CL’s tent hadn’t packed the fly in the tent bag, so we found ourselves unable to put up the tent) and I ended up bunking in the Red Canyon with Lucky Phil. God Bless his cotton socks for coming to the resuce. CindyLou ened up crashing in Macca’s tent for most of the weekend. Friday night we all got stuck into the grog and had a relatively early night as most of us were pretty shagged from the long drives to get there.

Saturday, Ms CindyLou and myself jumped in Jeff and headed out to the wine country. We had a fantastic time driving from vineyard to vineyard trying different wines. CL thought she didn’t like white wine and was a CabSav girl, but before the day was out – she was claiming the verdelhos were one of her favourite and I even had her drinking sparkling shiraz, voigniers, muscats and ports (which she normally hates!) She was lightly toasted by about 11.30am, at which point we thought we had better stop for some lunch, before hitting some more wineries. We managed a trip to the Smelly Cheese Shop, the Hunter Valley Cheese company at McGuigans and the Fudge House over at Petersens also. Got back to camp (significantly lighter in the wallet…. 3 cases of wine, four bottles of various ports and a bottle of muscat). Got back to camp late afternoon, and had a pretty big night from there.

Rowan had us all playing a very fast paced, diced based, drinking game called ThreeMan which was pretty damned dangerous – Lucky Phil didn’t fare so good from it on the vodka and OJ. Nasty stuff drinking games. I was fine drinking my port, though the guys had a go at me for not drinking as much as they were – until I pointed out my port was 18% compared to their 5% beers! I was holding up fine, until Sean the Bastard suggested we go off for a bit of a smoke, which sounded like a good idea at the time :S All up, we had lots of fun, the Attican boys are a wild bunch, drinking hard, swearing like troopers and carrying on the most outlandish conversations. They have a crazy, and somewhat combattive communication style that is really intriguing to watch. After an hour in the midst of one of their ‘rants’ you feel a bit battered about actually. Strangely it reminded me of when I was 15-16yo girl and fending off overly eager teenage boys at cadet camps… a not unpleasant but totally exhausting social assault! Pandas and Penguins and Forests, Indeed!

Sunday we spent the entire day sleeping in Macca’s tent, resting, and munching on cheese. And then Sunday night we did it all over again! The strangest thing that stands out from Sunday night was having to explain to Veniemen what a Soggy Sao is. We were all sitting around in a circle and one of the girls had her chair yoinked, so she plonked herself down in the middle of the circle. RaCeY called her a Sao, which caused a raucous laugh from everyone, a gasp of disbelief from me, and a confused ‘what the’ from Veniemen (American)! Anyway so there we were trying to explain to Veniemen what a Soggy Sao was…urgh! I alway thought it was an urban myth, but there were two guys (private school boys of course!) in the circle who assured me that it was no urban myth and they they had PARTICIPATED in Soggy Sao at school… eeeewww!!! Is there no depravity that the male of the species wont sink to when the pack mentality kicks in! Fucking disgusting. 😐

Had a relatively early night as we had a big drive home, which was largely uneventful… couldn’t believe the amount of cops out of the road – must have seen at least 20 radars etc on top of the stationery speed cameras, got flashed at once, so I probably got a ticket at one point. Time will tell. All up a great weekend, and I will be definately going to the 3rd Annual Wine Tour…. er… ahem…. I mean going to Spring War next year! 🙂