Sean and I just got back from The Hunter Valley where we spent a lovely part of the week driving around the NSW countryside with his parents, chasing kangaroos and frolicking in vineyards. Unfortunately on our last day there, Sean, his step mum and I got food poisoning and spent Friday afternoon through to around 3am Saturday morning violently ill. Anyone who has had food poisoning knows what it entails. Sean has described as the worst night of his life.

We are feeling better now but it stopped us from going up to Noosa with his folks which is a damn shame. We had fun in the Hunter however. I was kinda hoping that a winery tour meant a tour through the actual vineyards, but that was not the case and I still managed to get a few snaps in the vineyards anyway. The whole trip Sean was determined to see kangaroos in the wild and I swore to him that it wasn’t going to happen. I have driven through a lot of this country…from Sydney to Queensland and back on 2 separate trips, from Sydney to Melbourne to Ballarat to Sydney, from Sydney to Wagga Wagga numerous times and many trips to the South Coast and up to the Mountains. Not once have I ever seen a kangaroo in the wild. Not once have I ever seen a snake in the wild(although I never went looking for them).

Sure enough, at around lunchtime on our first day in the Hunter, Sean’s dad spotted a mob of them scattered up in bushland that Sean and I had just been photographing. We scurried to see them staring back at us, when they bounded off not long after.

On the trip back to our B and B that evening, we were spotting roos left, right and centre. I couldn’t believe it. Read Sean’s blog to find out about the disturbingly mammoth small child eating snake we encountered.

See all the photos in the gallery and some on flickr .