I like to think I give good gifts, I try to make something if I remember early enough but that doesn't really happen that often... I give vouchers/giftcards occasionally, usually if I don't know someone well or just can't think of something to give. But when some friend's birthdays came around, I remembered them talking about wanting to go horse riding and decided to give them experience vouchers. My one mistake was that I bought one for myself as well which meant I had to go. (note: I'm not a big fan of horse riding and I recently found out I'm allergic to them)
I bought the vouchers from Red Balloon and they kinda sat around for most of the year till we decided to use them in the summer, or so we thought (it was actually reall cold that weekend). The experience was in Warrnambool, and we decided we would spend the weekend there.
The drive was 4 hours on the inland road, we got there, checked into our accomodations (the lovely Elmtree Motel), and headed for dinner, IΒ had chosen a beachside restaurant called 'Simon's waterfront'.
The weather was dreadful that weekend (as mentioned before), hence why everyone looks rugged up:
The place itself is on a proper boardwalk.
We went in and were seated and ordered drinks, nothing special, lemon lime bitters.
We had a look at the menu and were disappointed to find there weren't oysters on the menu, mostly because I had a look at the menu on the website before booking. therefore, the website is misleading and was probably not been updated for awhile.
Oh well, we decided to give it a try anyway and ordered the tasting entree platter. It was actually pretty good, we enjoyed everything off it, from the olives, to the salad, quiche, potato slices and prawns.
Oh hey, random interior shot, the inside was spacious and also had a bit of a bar atmosphere.
On to mains, I had the steak, which on hindsight, I shouldn't have ordered. It was a little too colorful and the vegetables were a bit ordinary, so were the steak, sauce and mash.
A friend had the Chicken Risotto off the specials menu, I didn't think it was that amazing but she really liked it and polished it off in record time.
The real winner of the day was the seafood chowder, it came in a bread bowl and had ample seafood, amazing chowder and th chowder soaked bread was simply irresistable, totally wished I'd ordered that instead of the steak #drool.
Still hungry, the logical thing was to order dessert, again, we ordered the platter. Don't you love sharing platters? makes things easy, so one doesn't have to order 1 thing and look longingly at someone else's food. ok, so maybe I'm the only one that does that...
Chocolate ice cream on a lucious brownie:
ice cream nuggets:
Apple slices on more ice cream with cinnamon and berries:
...and some warm doughy pieces and an apple sauce, not as sweet as I would've liked, but something warm in the cold weather was definitely welcome..
Would I go again? Only if I get an entire bowl of seafood chowder to myself. hmm.
Next up in part 2, Horse riding on the beach, not as romantic as it looks and definitely no white horses...
