Iscar Christmas in the Hunter Valley

After dropping the kids off to Adrian's parents on the Thursday night, we left home at 5.00am Friday morning to catch a plane to Newcastle and then a bus to the Hunter Valley. We stayed at the Tallawantha Lodge at the Hunter Valley Gardens.

The boys went into Iscartech (conference) all day Friday while the wives and partners went out to lunch, wine tasting, a bit of shopping and some of them went off for the "fluffy" (as they called it) afternoon having massages.

Friday evening was a BBQ smorgasbord on the Shiraz Terrace. It wasn't a late night for me. I was shattered from some late nights previously and an early morning. At about 9.30pm I went back to my room for a luxurious bath with a hot chocolate. The bathroom was very inviting. The bath was a large oval, sunken, under a glass roof with a rock tiled wall. Just gorgeous.

Saturday morning was the Iscar Olympics out on the oval. The teams rotated around playing Volleyball, Bocce (spelling???), Croquet, and racing on skies and building towers. I didn't play because I was still recovering from surgery but I umpired.

After lunch we went for a walk through the Hunter Valley Gardens with Darren and Mel. Darren's arm was twisted to be there. I was really impressed with the gardens, there was a lot to see and they were very well kept.

After the walk in the gardens, Mel and I went on a winery tour with the rest of the Iscar employees and partners, but Adrian, Darren and Phil chose to stay behind and drink beer in the spa. When we returned we could hear them laughing from our rooms. Then I wished I had've stayed behind with them, they sound like they were having a great time. But I did have a great time on the winery tour and bought myself a nice bottle of red from Ivanhoe Vineyard. We also visited Lindermans. The guys running the tour were very entertaining. I think they were still drunk from their Christmas party the night before.

Then it was Saturday evening and we got ourselves all dressed up in 1920's costume for a Murder Mystery evening. We had to answer trivia questions and do silly things to gain more clues. One of the tasks was a girl from each table had to get on the dance floor and perform a dance. Mel ordered me to get up there and she put a chair out on the floor for me. There was no getting out of it so I got up and did a bit of a lap dance on the chair. There was lots of cheering and Adrian missed it. At least I gained us some extra clues; one of them sealed it for us. We ended up solving the murder correctly along with 2 other tables. After the murder mystery was over they put on the karaoke. I was disappointed by this, I just wanted to dance and not to a couple of people singing badly into the mic. So I figured if we had to listen to karaoke then we all might as well get involved. So I suggested to Jason (the boss) to make everyone join in by having a play off against states. Instead it was a playoff between tables, with us being the first. I guess seeing that I suggested it I had to get up and do it. It ended up being a great success with lots of groups getting up and of course Victoria had to get up and perform 'We are the Champions'. A couple of other songs I can remember doing were The Proclaimers, 500 miles and Rednex, Cotton Eye Joe. This one got everyone up dancing. We had a ball and the last 5 minutes of the night was just dancing. Adrian and I got up and did the 'Jive'. Well so called anyway, Adrian knew what he was doing but I had no idea. He was giving me a crash course on the Jive right there on the dance floor. It didn't matter if I made a fool of myself because I was having fun, and had a few too many red wines anyway.
Is that a gun in your pocket, or .....................?