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Featured Maps Articles

From the Hills (Beverly Hills) To The Beach (Santa Monica) BungaLOEWS
From the Hills (Beverly Hills) To The Beach (Santa Monica) BungaLOEWSRead Jetsetters Magazine at www.jetsettersmagazine.comTo read this entire feature FREE with photos cut and paste this ...

Ten Ways To Get Kids Excited About The Family Trip
You, your husband and two children, ages 10 and 13 are going on a long-anticipated—by you—trip to London and Paris. You and your husband have been there before and loved it so much that you simply must show your children those famous places and ...

Top Tourist Attractions In Paris
If you are visiting Paris for the first time, you might be overwhelmed when planning your itinerary and deciding which attractions to visit and in what order. Let's take a look at the top attractions in Paris that are a must see when planning your visit. ...





Sydney Road Trip -- The Hunter Region
 
Great Australian Road Trips

Sydneysiders may fight to the death arguing they live in the best place in Australia, but, when holiday time rolls around, it pays to watch where they go to relax and unwind.

Not two hours north rests the divine Hunter region, and it makes a brilliant Sydney road trip. The Hunter region is best known as Australia's vineyard, but there's loads more you can fool about in - old colonial towns, national parks, burning mountains, horse festivals, and more water sports than your travel insurance is prepared to cover.

If you don’t have a car of your own, do a Google search for “cheap car hire deals Australia” or visit websites that pool together the specials of all the most popular car rental companies.

So, from Sydney, head up inland to Wollombi, by taking the freeway and turning off at Calga. Wollombi is a great little place for a brief stopover. It has a distinctly “rustic look” (a very tired tourism platitude which very much applies to this little place), and is armed with a national park of the same name and some nearby wineries. Back in the car, the next stage of your road trip is to drive up Wollombi road until you hit Cessnock, which is about 30 kilometres away. This is probably the best place to set up camp and plan your attack on the area’s profusion of vineyards, most of which are around nearby Pokolbin.

To help you choose which wineries you'd like to visit, check out http://www.winecountry.com.au/ or visit Cessnock's Wine Country Tourism office for maps and brochures. But among the wineries in the area you might want to think about include: Tyrrell’s Vineyard, which is plonked right in the middle of romantic scenery in the Brokenback Ranges; Pepper Tree Winery, which is a boutique wine operation just off Broke road in Pokolbin; and of course, you shouldn’t really go past Lindemans - it is one of the biggest names in wine in Australia. Head to McDonalds road, they’re open daily for wine tastings.

After you’ve sobered up, get


back into your car and make the short drive north from Cessnock to Maitland, which is a pretty town full of old colonial architecture and historical ambiance. You don’t need a long time here though, so get back on the road and head up to Scone on the New England Highway.

Here, once again, you’ll be bombarded with all the rustic farmland scenery of before, more wineries yes, but this here is horse country - the business of breeding thoroughbreds is serious ‘round here. The day they build a golden horse idol to worship isn’t far away. They’ve already got the horse festival in May and a six-week Hunter Horse expo in September. The Barrington Tops National Park is nearby. And while you’re gadding about, why not visit the biblical-sounding Burning Mountain - which actually is burning, and has been for about a thousand years, ever since an underground coal seam caught fire.

Turning you’re car around, the last stage of your road trip involves heading back down the New England Highway, this time passing Maitland until you get to Newcastle. You’re now on the doorstep of Lake Macquarie - Australia's largest salt-water lake. It’s here you’ll encounter a clear-water paradise with water sports aplenty. Wend your merry way around the shores, driving through tiny villages and holiday towns like Belmont, Swansea and Toronto. Explore the Watagan Mountains, which flank the western side of the lake, for a sniff of fresh air and a good view.

All that’s really left is to take your time heading back onto the freeway towards Sydney, refreshed and ready to take on all the congested traffic conditions the city can throw at you.




Maps News



Ciudad Juarez back on border region tourist maps
Fox News
HASH(0x8b40010) Ciudad Juarez is returning to maps featuring attractions for visitors to the US-Mexico border region around El Paso after two years of being excluded due to a wave of drug-related violence. "Ciudad Juarez should never have been excluded ...


First map of Australia's Twittersphere
Phys.Org
By analyzing topics of interest and concern to Australians the researchers have been able to build a 'network map' showing the connections between different issues and areas. "Just as newspapers have circulation reports and TV has its ratings, ...

and more »

TomTom expands map coverage for its plug and play data solution for Oracle ...
MarketWatch (press release)
Already available throughout Europe and North America and now in key countries in South America, the product enables easy integration of TomTom map and routing data into location based applications powered by Oracle Database 11g.

and more »

Wired News

Adventures of Apollo Astronauts Now Tracked in 3-D
Wired News
That data has in turn allowed planetary scientists to build the most precise 3-D maps yet of the Apollo 17 mission site. “We're making these images more valuable by giving them incredibly accurate coordinates,” said planetary scientist Mark Robinson of ...

and more »

Three Maps and Several Numbers That Explain the Tuesday Night Primaries
Slate Magazine (blog)
I already shared this last night, but here's a map of coal country. Obama was weakest in areas that depend on the coal industry. There were other patterns, but none as clear-cut. 5) Mitt Romney's vote total in Arkansas: 102183.

and more »