Heat and fires

At last . . . relief from the heat!

I write this in a lovely caravan park at historic Longford, just south of Launceston, our home for the next 2 nights on the grassy banks of the Macquarie River.
Unfortunately there seems to be something odd about the blogging website tonight and I can't seem to insert any pix. So you'll just have to put up with some pen pictures instead.

We arrived today after several days on the east coast, mostly out of mobile phone coverage, so we could send and receive text messages (sort of) but could not make calls or access the internet.

After we left Triabunna we headed north to Coles Bay and the Freycinet National Park. Glorious! The place was seething with people and we fully expected we would not find a parking spot in the carpark from where one sets out on the national park walks.

But the Nat Parks person supervising the parking took one look at our rig and directed us to the area for tour buses. Then we walked to the Wineglass Bay lookout (about 2 hours) and quite steep in places, although well laid-out with lots of stone steps.

I had done that walk when in Tasmania in 1995 for Nigel’s wedding and remembered it as much more rugged. Aha! The way down was in fact mostly that old track, and our knees certainly told us all about it that night.

We were cruising the beaches north of Coles Bay when we decided to stop for lunch at one of the Friendly Beaches free camping areas. Most of these little niches among the heath were already occupied but a largish one near the toilets (pit, with a rather nifty flushing pump handle thingy) had just a young couple putting up a tent.

We decided to stay . . . and by nightfall were surrounded by tents, other campervans, and even people sleeping in cars.

Although a glorious beach, it was very windy and we knew the next day was going to be very hot . . . and we were fed up with the fine blackish sand around the vehicles . . . so we headed north the next morning, finding some lovely salmon fillets from a fish shop on the wharf at Bicheno.

This nice little town was in mourning for a popular GP who had died on Christmas Eve and several shops had signs announcing they would be closed for his funeral service.

After buying some rather special bits and pieces in the post office, which also doubles as a small gallery for local card makers, leather workers and jewellers, we pushed on further north to Scamander where we found a caravan park close to the ocean. On the way we saw fire up in the hills and heard on the radio that night that fires were threatening places in the east and south.

I will never forget my birthday, the next day, as that was Tasmania’s hottest for decades. It reached around 39C in Scamander, with a howling westerly wind to boot, so we just retreated inside and cranked up the air-conditioning for the first time. It was a totally lazy day, as we spent it sleeping, lying around, reading and doing a large crossword in the Age newspaper. A letter in that paper that day had queried how many people were able to do the daily summer crossword without resorting to Google, dictionaries, a thesaurus, or some other internet search engine.

Well, we did! Mainly because we could not access any of those things anyway.

It was a huge relief when the sun finally went down . . . it’s still twilight here about 9pm . . . and the air cooled slightly. But of course, the evening news was full of the disaster that the Tasman Peninsula had become, and we heard that campers at Friendly Beaches south of Bicheno were being evacuated because of a fire risk. How glad we were that we had left that morning!

The wind changed during the night and we awoke today to find it so cool we needed long sleeves to start the day, and the air was full of smoke. As we left the east coast and headed inland, we drove away from that smoke into the dry, dry midlands, full of sheep and wheat.

We explored the pretty little town of Evandale,  then went west to Longford, which is delightful, and decided to stay. This afternoon we went just out of town to the historic Woolmers estate, in the Archer family for 180 years until the last owner died without issue in 1994 and it passed to a foundation which runs it now. The homestead and buildings still contained everything the family had acquired over the years, including furniture and china from England and a whole section had been added in 1840, just for entertaining.

It is also the site of the National Rose Garden, which was showing the effects of that extraordinarily hot day yesterday. We thoroughly enjoyed our afternoon there but it was a really warm afternoon so we were pleased to return to our riverside site, where people were canoeing and fishing, and like us, sitting in the shade having pre-dinner drinks.

In a complete turnaround of weather, so typical of Tasmania, the wind cooled a lot in the early evening and we found ourselves reaching for jackets again.

Tomorrow is forecast to reach 27C so it should be a lovely day for exploring this pretty little town, and maybe the mountains nearby.