Antidote to baby blues

Luxe living ... de Russie Suites lobby. Photo: Justin Wastnage

The article below by Alexandra Smith originally appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald's Traveller.
You can read the article in it original form here.


Hotel review: De Russie suites, Orange, NSW

Alexandra Smith finds pregnancy is no impediment to enjoying a wine region.

Initially I suspect my husband might have scored the better deal when he insisted we spend my last child-free birthday in one of the best wine regions in central-western NSW.

To make the most of Orange's famed cellar doors, he needs a designated driver and what better person for that job than his heavily pregnant wife? After all, I have grown accustomed to my new role as taxi driver.

I must admit, my reluctance is shortlived when we are blessed with an unseasonably warm weekend as we arrive in Orange and simultaneously discover the birthplace of Banjo Paterson is not just about wine and fruit. Or homely B&Bs or ageing motor inns, for that matter.

On a tree-lined street a block back from the main drag, the de Russie Suites is a chic apartment hotel clearly designed to impress the urbanites and appears to be succeeding, judging by the flash European cars in the car park.

The polished concrete exterior resembles architecture from the Stalin era but, once we're inside, the piped lounge music and upholstered chairs arranged by a fire create a soft landing. In the true country way, our welcome is warm.

We have booked the Blue Room, the hotel's version of the penthouse: spacious, opulent and impressive by most standards. We are greeted by a huge bunch of flowers on a pedestal in the lounge room. Once we peer around the imposing arrangement, we find the Blue Room, or 303 as it is also known, is stylishly decorated with a Tuscan influence.

On the four-seater dining table is a bottle of sparkling wine, two Belgian chocolates and a card wishing me a happy birthday. My husband has obviously given the heads-up to management and it's a sweet touch, even if I can't enjoy the bubbles.

The self-contained room, which gets its name from its striking cobalt-blue feature wall, has a separate bedroom with an austere four-poster bed covered in decorative pillows bearing portraits of queens.

The faces do not belong to the British monarchy; my husband convinces me they are probably the wife and daughter of William I of Orange, the Dutch renegade prince who led the war against Spain and reunited the Netherlands.

To read more, please click here to go to the SMH site.

Horsing around in Ferraris

This article originally appeared in TravelWeekly Australia

Driving Ferraris has become a top corporate team building exercise in Sydney. Justin Wastnage recently took four of the red super cars for a test drive







Speed, they say, is not everything. But not to one West Australian automotive
journalist clocked at over 225km/h a few weeks back. He copped a $2000 fine and six-month ban for driving a Ferrari F149 California at twice the speed limit.
I am reminded of the speed limit as part of the briefing given by Prancing Horse, the driving tour
operators whose Ferrari corporate drive days have grown fourfold in the past year despite the recession.
I will soon be given the keys to one of four turbocharged luxury sports cars and will have a chance to drive each one by the end of the day.
That’s about a million dollars’ worth of hardware they are entrusting to me, which is why I, along with seven others, am listening intently to Matt Thio, business development director of Prancing Horse over early morning Italian coffee and pastries in the firm’s ‘stables’ in Marrickville, Sydney.
Its location makes for easy access to the state’s Royal National Park, which in turn winds its way to the Grand Pacific Drive, New South Wales’s coastal road stretching down to Wollongong. The highlight of the tour is the Sea Cliff Bridge section of the Lawrence Hargrave Drive, the $52 million cantilever bridge that runs along the cliff face, suspending you in mid air above the crashing waves. Again, the speed limit of 60km/h is observed.
In truth, there are sections where the drivers can open the cars to something like their full potential. I had mine accelerate from 30 to 125km/h in a little under four seconds. But the real beauty is in the cars. I am in a Ferrari F430 Spider, behind me are an F360 Spider, an F355 Spider and my favourite, the fully-manual F328 GTS, as popularised by Tom Selleck
in Magnum PI. Each can draw admiring looks from bystanders.
Most bookings Prancing Horse takes are for corporate events and team-building. The company is actively promoting the drive days on the weekends, not only to men, but increasingly ladies’ days out (the two-day spa packages staying at the Gerringong boutique hotel Bellachara are popular with “second marriage hen parties”, Thio says.
The company also has plans to expand the fully-commissionable product to Victoria’s Great Ocean Road and possibly an as-yet undisclosed location on the Gold Coast. Anywhere there is a road and a speed limit, it seems. ■

Details: A one-day package costs $990 per driver, two days with a night at Bellachara starts from January, priced at $1490. All products are commissionable at 10%.
Contact: www.prancinghorse.com.au or 1300 307050