Australia

Yesterday at the park our Melbourne friends told us about the Platypus house. We have seen almost every single Australian animal but the Platypus has alluded us. They are near impossible to see outside of Australia (even in captivity) so today was our last chance. We drove 45 minutes through rain and arrived at the…

Launceston is pronounced lawn-sess-tun, not launce-ton as we had assumed. Australia either shortens things to 2 syllables or adds some extras for fun. Keeps us on our toes. The drive should have been 2 hours but Nick found a stop for us. We drove about 1.5 hours to the Walls of Jerusalem. On our way…

We decided to take advantage of staying in a nicer hotel this morning for two things. First, we ate giant, protein filled breakfasts. We have been mostly surviving on cereal that we’ve been carrying around so having a big real breakfast was a treat. Then, we spent a couple of hours using the fast WiFi…

Same drill: fed, caffeinated, and on the road by 10. Today’s drive took us back on the same road that we took yesterday, but in the opposite direction so we got a whole new set of views. Beautiful once again. There were lots of “watch out for wombats” signs which I thought were cute and…

Same morning as always, breakfast in the room and packed up and on the road just after 10AM. Today’s drive was just under 3 hours and very, very beautiful. We felt like we saw 8 different types of environments over the course of it. As we left we talked about how much southern Tasmania felt…

Today we began our Tasmanian road trip. We left Hobart at 10 and everything became rural very quickly. We drove alongside a river, and then up into hills. Unlike the Outback drive, this one required some effort from our driver Nick. It was twisty and turny and the speed limit kept jumping around drastically. At…

Another day, another museum. Except this one was unlike any of the others we’ve been to. MONA is billionaire Tasmanian David Walsh’s brainchild / gift to Hobart / ego trip. Nick told me last night that Walsh made his fortune on “gambling” and so I assumed he owned a bunch of casinos in Australia and…

“Today was a homecoming of sorts; a return to my roots; a journey outwards to find what is within…” — My boots if they wrote a daily blog about their travels. Today we flew to Tasmania. Before planning this trip I knew two things about Tasmania. 1. Blundstone boots are from here, according to the…

We had a “hangout morning”. All that really means is that we didn’t do anything all morning and didn’t leave the house until afternoon. Millie did some reading and crafting, and we continued to book the endless amounts of things we need to book. When we finally did leave, we walked over to the National…

Quite a boring one today! I had a work call about a potential job so Nick took Millie out this morning. It feels strange, but also kind of nice, to start thinking about what might be on the other side of this trip for me. After that was done, I did some trip planning, digital…