You gotta love a weekend that combines some old car perving, great tunes, vintage shopping, cool house scouting and fine food! We just got back from a weekend that combined all that.
I got word form my brother that The Fumes and The Blackwater Fever were touring together, both of whom I’ve been jonesing to check out in person for a few years now. With my partner’s work schedule, the best gig for us was down at Austinmer, so we thought what the hell and decided to have a short weekend away and stay the night.
Venue for the gig was the Heritage Hotel at Bulli. It’s an old school pub who always seem to have a great calendar of quality gigs coming up. Food was honest good quality pub food. The Blackwater Fever were great, the singer’s husky vocals a perfect match for their haunting guitar and primevil drums. The Fumes were awesome, despite only knowing a handful of their songs the two piece completely blew me away. With a battered guitar held together with tape the lead was the perfect frontman with his awesome handlebar mo and truckers cap and powerful voice. The gig definitely left me a massive fan! If you like blues which is covered in dirt and oil, maybe slept a few rough nights on the street, and has an odour of bourbon you’ll love both the Fever and the Fumes, check em both out. A decent gig review would have pics and a set list, but this isn’t one.
The next morning, this was the view that greated us from our doorstep in Austinmer. With a day like this the road was chockas with bikes and cars fresh from an early morning blast through the Royal.
Brekky was a cool little cafe in Austinmer called the Fireworks Cafe. Hidden off the main drag and located in a historic old butcher shop, it still had the vintage tiles bearing the marks of years of service. The menu is seasonal and updated regularly, so they just write it direct on the tile walls! Despite it getting some hit and miss reviews online, we found it great and will definitely look to check it out again.
After brekky we went for a bit of a cruise and spied some cool cars like this Mustang at one of the beaches and this neat lowlight baywindow kombi.
We took the long way home and headed down the coast and back up through the Kangaroo Valley. If you do a little sniffing around there’s a tight and twisty backroad from Berry to the Valley which is great fun. If you’re in Kangaroo Valley I highly suggest you check out The Nostalgia Factory, they’ve got some awesome vintage items and their prices are pretty reasonable. Check out these old car ads and mens mag.
And a couple of classics we also spied around Kangaroo Valley.
And with that we hit the road and made a beeline home. A top little weekend away!
