Amid chocolate and trains

And so we came to Tasmania, aboard the Spirit of Tasmania, on relatively calm seas, dining well in the restaurant and sleeping deeply in our cabin until 5am when we woke to see Devonport approaching.

It had been a long wait, along with other motorhomes and cars towing caravans, to board the ship, and our vehicles were garaged with all the semi-trailers, but this meant we were among the first off.

Once clear of the quarantine check (no fruit or vegies into Tassie) we sped south and decided to indulge ourselves with breakfast at the House of Anvers. This is a Belgian chocolatier’s headquarters in a lovely old house and garden. No, we didn’t actually have chocolate for breakfast (croissants and pesto mushrooms), but we DID have steaming pots of hot chocolate.

We had most of the day to fill before heading west to Smithton and the family, as nobody was home until early afternoon. So back we went to Devonport, drove around, walked the Mersey River foreshore and found a splendid sculpture of the Spirit of the Sea at the river entrance, along with poignant memorials to 17 young district men who had died in the Vietnam war.



The little railmotor in which we had a short ride
at the Don Railway Museum.



We also checked out the gloriously-striped lighthouse on the seafront before driving out to the Don Railway Museum. We thought we were a bit early but it was open and we had a ride on one of its trains along a line to the seafront and back. There were only four of us on board. The driver was one of the volunteers, mostly elderly, who work on restoration of a big collection of locos and rolling stock. Another showed us around some of the current projects and we were fascinated by a big wooden box full of the biggest spanners we’d ever seen.

It seems that each works on a specific bolt on a specific loco or carriage. Some of the oldest carriages dated back to the 1870s and it seems railways stitched Tasmania together, particularly on the west coast where there were few roads.

Then we pottered on to Smithton, and the family. We were in charge of the two youngest for the weekend as Nigel and Tracey were off to a concert in a Launceston vineyard and the eldest had things to do in Burnie.



Callum and Erin Somerville fooling about on a tandem bike
on the riverfront near their home in Smithton.



It was a busy weekend. First the nearby Stanley show (very windy but good fun), some fishing off the nearby wharves (their house is on the eastern esplanade of the Duck River), some walking and shopping and generally keeping the household going until parents returned on the Sunday night.

We left on Monday, aiming to get as far east along the northern coast as we could, but we dillied and dallied and got distracted in various places . . . and by gloriously delicious berry icecream near Port Sorell . .. so only reached Beaconsfield by mid-afternoon and made camp in the showgrounds there, meeting some Queenslanders who had already been in Tasmania for 10 weeks and will not leave until Anzac Day.

Today, we’ll visit the local gold mining museum, then explore the Tamar Valley. Life continues to be very good.

PS. The bathing boxes I featured in the previous blog were at Brighton Beach, not St Kilda. I hadn't realised we had driven so far south when I took the photo.