A Travellors Stopoff.

Saturday 28th August, our second visitor arrived - my good friend Leanne. She has been travelling through Africa and visiting relatives in Perth and decided to add Tasmania to her list of places visited!

It was great to have a friend around and to get so much catch up time with Leanne - in the past we have had to cram our catch ups in to a couple of lunch dates while she's been back in NZ (from the UK), so a whole week was lovely!

Cupcakes of course were required to welcome Leanne. We had a walk up Cataract Gorge one day, saw some cool wooden sculptures up there.

                                                 

Afternoons (once I had finished work) were spent going for walks in the sun, and to different cafes for coffee & cake.

I took Friday off work so that we could have a long weekend together, we rented a car and were off on a little road trip :) Of course there was the obligatory visit to the Christmas Hills Raspberry Farm for breakfast before driving up to Cradle Mountain.

There were a couple of Pademelon's (small relatives of the Wallaby) grazing near the Visitors Centre, and as we were on the bus into the National Park, we saw a Wombat!

There had been some snow a few days before we got there, so the mountain was looking very picturesque, and there was some snow across the path around Dove Lake (at the bottom of the mountain) that we had to walk through.

From Cradle Mountain we drove to Strahan, where we stayed the night. Was funny checking into the motel - there was no one there, but a message saying "pick up the white phone by the laundry" - the person on the other end then told us that we were in Room 2 and the key was in the door!! Obviously more of a summer town, we were pretty much pushed out the door of the restaurant we had dinner in - at 9pm on a Friday night!

Saturday morning (4th Sept) woke to lots of rain - its the west coast of Tassie after all! And by chance we turned the TV on and caught the news - big earthquake in Christchurch, NZ. Of course I had no cell phone reception, but the owner of the motel let me use the computer to get in touch with family.

As the weather didn't improve, we spent the day driving back along the coast. Stopping at the Gingerbread house in Devonport for lunch - we were adventurous and tried the Gingercino (cappuccino with ginger) but wouldn't recommend it!

On Sunday we headed down to Hobart, stopping in Evandale to have a look through the market there. We went via Richmond and saw the oldest bridge in Australia.

When we arrived in Hobart we were greeted with a flat tyre!!! In between sorting that out we managed to have a walk round the water front, and some more coffee & cake before Leanne checked in to the backpackers for the night (her flight left from Hobart the next day) and I drove back to Launceston.

Was a lovely time with a lovely friend :)