Lunch in a country pub

Today we went to the Mountain Country Markets at Mangrove Mountain. The markets aren't that great - there were about 15 stalls, selling a mix of organic vegetables, crafts & cakes/biscuits. What is good is having an excuse to drive around the area - which has a stunning natural beauty. After the market we decided to keep on driving to St Albans, with the inention of visiting the Settler's Arms pub for lunch. We took part of the Convict Trail to get there. This is an amazing drive over a 35km dirt road - since I wasn't driving I was able to enjoy the views and imagine what it might have been like back in 1826 when the road was started.

Unfortunately when we arrived in St Albans, there was a line out the door of people waiting to get lunch at the pub. We weren't in the mood to line up, so decided to drive on to Wiseman's Ferry. You have to take a car ferry to get across the Hawkesbury River - it's free & even though it's a really short trip (only a couple of minutes), I enjoyed it.

Here are a some photos out of the car window - you can just see the second car ferry in the right of this one.

Eventually we ended up at the Wiseman's Inn Hotel. This isn't a vegetarian-friendly place, the options were limited to a garden salad or chips. To be honest though, you'd have to be pretty silly to expect great vegan food in a country pub like this one, so I'm not complaining. Trying to be healthy, I went with the garden salad. Now, what I do object to when I order a garden salad, is receiving a mix of garden & greek salads, including feta cheese! It was easy enough to pick the feta out (which I did, because I really hate sending food back). Here is the salad, already sans feta - as you can see it was all really fresh & was also a huge serving.
And here are a couple of photos of the outside of the pub - it's a beautiful building.

Watch out for more NSW adventures tomorrow!

Wiseman's Inn Hotel
Lot 1, Old Northern Rd, Wiseman's Ferry
www.wisemanshotel.com.au