@Idez
Thanks for the heads up on this issue. It was definitely a pfSense problem with my pfSense intercepting all requests on port 53 and forwarding them back to the unbound resolver itself. It basically would not let any outbound packets pass on port 53 so the external resolver was never reached. It took me a long time to find out the root cause of this problem however you were pretty much correct in pointing me in the right direction on this one.
Thanks.