Tasmania

This last weekend we spent some time in Tasmania. It seemed so strange that I was going to visit what seemed to be such a far off place when I was a kid thumbing through encyclopedias (I know, I wasn't normal). Home of the Tasmanian Devil and the Tasmanian Tiger (supposidly extinct, but the northern part of the island continues to rumor sightings to this day). Jill's parents flew in on Friday and we all few out on Saturday. It was a quick flight. We arranged another marathon tour to try and pack as much into three days as possible. Saturday we drove up the east coast. Highlights of Saturday were a little town called Richmond, finding shells on the beaches, and roast pork at a pub. Sunday we did a morning hike at our B&B, visited Launceston's Cataract Gorge (where we took the photo below of the wallaby baby in mamma's pouch), and toured the Platypus House at Beauty Point.

May I take a moment to pause and reflect on the platypus. Such an amazing animal (this is why I did a report on them for Mr. Honeywell in the 4th grade)! They are one of only two mammals that lay eggs. They have fur and a tail like a beaver, webbed feed and a bill like a duck, walk on land like a crocodile, and males have venomous spurs on their hind legs. Fascinating... just fascinating.

Monday, we drove down through the center of the island on the Heritage Highway. There were numerous towns that have original buildings from the early to mid 1800s. Apparently, Tasmania was the main location of early settlements in Australia. Another interesting feature of Tassie is that it seems like most every structure of historical significance was built by convicts. There was one town that told a brief statement of the individual convicts on bricks in their sidewalks. These statements had the boat they traveled over on, their name, crime and sentence like this:

The Enterprise, 1845

John Brown

Stole a pocket watch

15 years

A much different time, and not such a different place. Oh, and we saw road kill everywhere! In fact, it was highly recommended that you don't drive during dusk and dawn because your odds of hitting a creature was very high, hence the reason for the somewhat difficult to interpret sign shown above--is the kangaroo lifting the car or car striking the kangaroo? This one on the right is quite interesting--we were a bit worried at first; what would the speedo check involve? What if you didn't bring your speedo with you on this trip?

Well that is all for now... until next time!