Birthday Boy's Day

For Ollie's birthday, we had a food based adventure day. I enlisted our friend Ruth to help me out and provide us with her company for the day.

In a style typical to me, Ollie was given few details - just being told that he needed to be ready to leave the house by 10am and that he didn't need to have breakfast first. About 10ish Ruth arrived and whisked us away in her car.....to the Christmas Hills Raspberry Farm....one of our favourite cafes. We got to sit in front of the open fire, while eating a very decadant brunch.

From here we headed out to Penguin - a cute little seaside village...full of penguins (not real ones though). We had a look round the town, and the village market.

Next up was time for more food.....off to the House of Anvers Chocolate Factory for some tasting.

And as if that wasn't enough food for the day....our next stop was the Cherry Shed, for a shared platter of nibbles (including Cherry Relish & Cherry/Chilli Jam) as well as sampling some Cherry Wine, Cherry Liquer and Cherry port...finished off by a Cherry Real Fruit Ice Cream.

But still there was more! A Birthday cake was waiting at home for Ollie - however I let my reputation slip a little and it wasn't even decorated (it was all about the taste this year!) and no photo of it either!

The day was going to be finished with dinner at a fancy restaurant, but being Sunday the place I had chosen wasn't open! So we just had takeaways....got to keep the food levels up!!!!

Thanks to Ruth for aiding and abetting me with my plans, and joining us for the day :)

Exams are over Expedition.

After a week of exams (one from 9-12 every morning) Ollie was ready for a break, and so was I! Luckily we still had Ruth's car, so we made a plan to get out of town. Starting off with brunch at Campbell town we headed over to the East coast. We'd had a week of mostly sunny weather in Launceston with only one day of rain, and had obviously been living in our own little world as we hadn't realised how much rain they had been having on the East coast. Turned out we were lucky to get through as the road had been closed for a while....we could see why!

We had a look round Coles Bay, and Bicheno. It was a pretty wet day, though despite the crashing waves on the beach it wasn't so windy.

From there we headed up to St Mary's where we braved getting out of the care - to run into a cafe for lunch! We then followed the coast up to St Helen's and then as far along the Bay of Fires as we could go - including Binalong Bay.

The East Coast is supposed to be one of the most stunning parts of Tasmania....shame about the torrential rain when we visited - I bet with the sun shining on the water it would have definitely had the Wow factor. Hopefully we will get a chance to explore this part of Tassie again - in the sunshine preferably so we can get out and walk along the beaches. Was just what we needed though - to get out of town, and have a change of scenery!!

Our next adventure is a trip to NZ to visit friends and family, and for Ollie to say hi to his Boat!

A few wee adventures.

Been a bit quiet on the blog front - I was away in Taiwan for 10days (for my brothers wedding, but thats a whole other story!), and since then the past month has been pretty quite. Ollie had his Part A exams last week - five 3hr exams (one a day) so he has been very busy studying.

One weekend, when the sun was shining and Ollie's brain reached saturation point, we went for a little drive down the river to Beauty Point.

We sat in a little cafe watching the boats sail on the river. (Made Ollie miss his yacht even more!)

On the way back we drove (and then walked on) the Batman Bridge (which we had been under on our River Cruise).

And watched the sunset over the river

We've had some pretty chilly weather over here, one morning at 9am it was 0.3 degrees!!! Some misty mornings too - I babysat over night a while ago, and the house I was in was on the hill so I could see over the top of the mist that we have in town.

We had a fundraising morning tea at the cafe last week - raising money for the Cancer Council. To add some fun to it we made it a cupcake bake off - these were my creations.