First School Holiday Road Trip day 10 Hobart to Launceston

As I write this I am hiding in the cabin.  It is something like 4 degrees outside and my men have a campfire lit and are roasting "marshmallows".  I know that I should go out there and join them and be all in and all of that good stuff...but my wine is in here and so is the heater...so here we are.

We started today off in Hobart and drove 4 hours to Cradle Mountain.  Cradle Mountain was must see and the hike around Dove Lake was not to be missed.  So we hauled our gear in to Wanda and off we went.  I can tell you that if Dave didn't know how to drive a 5 speed when he arrived in Australia he surely does now!  He's driven on more mountain roads than most goats and he's got it sorted now.

We stopped to go to the loo en route and also grabbed our lunch fixings out of the esky. I have become an expert at short order sandwich making from the passenger seat.  I'm confident that this couldn't possibly have anything to do with Wanda's olfactory offensiveness. 

So we pulled in to Cradle Mountain's visitor reception center.  I'll pause here for a wee back story.

We paid for parking for all of Tasmania's national parks when we went to Freycinet national park a few days ago.  We had been informed that parking is a gong show at Cradle Mountain and that if you don't get in to the park before 9, you won't get a parking spot and they'll put you on a shuttle bus in from he visitor centre.  There was no good way to get here that early, and it's possible that this whole Cradle Mountain thing was the subject of a massive blow up...

So anyhow we pulled in to Cradle Mountain at 1:30 and parked the car.  The boys thought that the whole shuttle bus thing was absolutely awesome.  They eagerly hopped aboard and we made our way to the starting point of our 6k 2-3 hour (tourist time) hike.

The hike itself was lovely.  We circled Dove lake and stopped to grab several photos.  There were not very many other people out on the walk.  It was reasonably peaceful.

Here's the back end of a wombat that crossed behind the bus

 

 on the hike we saw nature

 So we took a photo of ourselves in the nature.

We finished the hike in just over an hours worth of actual walking.  We hopped on the awesome shuttle bus and started the drive to Ulverstone.

We arrived in Ulverstone, found the drive through bottle shop, bought groceries for tonight's diet dinner buffet and checked in to our accommodation. Of course our accommodation has donkeys, a cat, a dog, chickens, horses and more.  The boys were thrilled to get some stale bread to feed to the livestock and to get a ride in this:

 We all sat around and enjoyed some of the Bruny Island cheese before dinner.

Then the boys went out and looked at the stars and roasted marshmallows.