We recently learned about Rail Discovery Passes, which allow you unlimited travel on NSW regional trains, as well as extending all the way to Brisbane and Melbourne. This suits our goal of doing more regional travel in 2025, so we recently bought six-month passes. Today we used them for the first time, catching a very early train from Sydney and riding 90 minutes to Mittagong in the Southern Highlands.
We started the day by grabbing some coffee and heading to Lake Alexandra. We patted dogs, looked for turtles, and learned about the history of the Fitzroy Iron Works.
The park has a fun playground too.
We spent an hour or two shopping in town, and I got a couple skeins of wool from Victoria House. Our real destination though – and the original motivation for the trip – was Paste Australia. This award-winning Thai restaurant is run by a Michelin-starred chef who relocated from Bangkok to Mittagong, and we’d heard great things about it.
We had a booking for noon, and it turns out we were the only people there! Other dates were booked out, so I think the cool, rainy weather kept people away. We had the set lunch and chose to start with the grilled eggplant salad…
…along with the roasted duck with rice crackers.
For mains, we had Jeen Juan chicken curry…
…and the restaurant’s speciality, Sator Pad Goong, with prawns, pork, and “Thai cluster beans.”
The set lunch also came with green beans (with garlic and chilli) and rice.
Everything was delicious, and of course, the service was phenomenal since we were the only ones there! Well worth the special trip.
After lunch, we went for a wander over to Eden Brewery and sampled some of their brews. Cool place.
The weather had turned seriously windy, cold, and rainy, so we called an Uber and headed to nearby Bowral. We had several hours until our return train, so we joined every pensioner in Bowral for a showing of Conclave at the New Empire Cinema.
After the film – which is fantastic – we did some window shopping along Bong Bong street. Hey, that’s right, Don Bradman is from here!
And then it was time to head home! Our train was a little delayed so we watched the darkening sky from the platform.
From Michelin-starred lunch to a meat pie on the train. Classy 😂
