A bit of rain the day before had washed the cloudless sky of dust and the wind was light.

So when Herald photographer Dean Osland and I flew over the new Hunter Expressway for a bird’s eye view – in a Cessna owned by Royal Newcastle Aero Club – our pilot Bob was lyrical about the joys of flying.

I’m not a keen flyer myself, but on such a perfect day even I had nothing to complain about. And Bob was a considerate pilot, obligingly helping us find the best angles for our photos and video shots.

It was a great way to see how this new roadway works, and you can see why it cost so much, with its bridges, flyovers, roundabouts and other bits and pieces. You can see, too, how valuable it could be in future, opening up big new areas for development.

What I couldn’t get out of my head was amazement that such a great piece of infrastructure had been built in the Hunter.

Building it was, by all accounts, a pretty challenging exercise in engineering terms.

But getting the money out of the federal and state governments – now that was a once-in-a-generation achievement.

When the thing gets officially opened, everybody and their dog will be scrambling for a bit of credit, and good luck to those who deserve it. Many do.

I’ll be tipping my hat, quietly, to the global financial crisis, to the federal Treasury and to former PM Kevin Rudd.

They deserve some credit, since it was the Rudd government’s urgent desire to find ‘‘shovel-ready’’ projects to inject stimulus funding into the frightened economy that finally pushed this road to the top of the list.

The earliest I can remember people promoting this roadway was in the 1990s, when they reckoned it was going to cost about $180million.

Everybody agreed it was a great project with a lot of benefits, but because it wasn’t in Sydney or in a state with a government that cares about its non-capital cities, it languished.

The state allocated some planning funds pretty early in the piece, but it never looked like chipping in any serious money, arguing instead that it was a federal job.

By 2006, Hunter Labor MP Joel Fitzgibbon, in whose electorate the road lies, was telling the Coalition federal government that he didn’t care if the road had to be a private tollway, just so long as it got built before it got too expensive for anybody to ever contemplate.

The Coalition feds found about $250million to get it started. But it didn’t start, because the state didn’t want to contribute.

It took the Rudd-slide election to put the project on the map. That’s when Paterson MP Bob Baldwin promised that the Coalition would stump up another $780million if his mob got back in. Fitzy, for his part, said Labor would match that promise.

Until Labor got in, when all bets were suddenly off because, Fitzy said, the money hadn’t really been allocated. Oh, and the NSW government didn’t have its $240million share to spare anyway.

Enter the financial crisis and the need for stimulus spending.

Mr Rudd asked the then NSW ALP government for a list of priorities for stimulus spending, and naturally Nathan Rees and his crew came up with a pile of great ideas for Sydney, apparently scribbled on a serviette.

On the other hand, the Hunter Expressway – backed by studies galore – was well down the NSW government’s list.

Maybe worried by the NSW government’s lack of enthusiasm for the project, Mr Rudd commissioned a $1million study to double-check the supporting documentation. It came up smelling of roses. So, despite the NSW government’s attempts to divert any cash to whatever half-baked Sydney proposal it could sell, the feds forked out $1.7billion.

The state ended up throwing in $200million, even though the job was in the Hunter.

It’s a bloody marvel, in our own backyard.