Nov 8-11: Tasmania: We got up early for the flight. Once we arrived, we immediately picked up our campervan and drove to a beautiful coastal spot. The campervan was rattling quite a bit.
Walked around a lavender spot and tasted lavender ice cream, delicious!
Minor issue, major issue, a really annoying one: we had gas problems. The refrigerator didn't seem to be working, so we wondered if the gas valve was even open. After a bit of thought, a pointless conversation with the campervan owners, and some more thought, we figured out what had happened: during the demonstration when we picked up the campervan, the woman had turned on the gas valve but hadn't closed it again... In other words, we drove for over an hour with the tank open, which is dangerous. Luckily, nothing happened, but still. Dangerous, and it cost us an hour, because you want to be absolutely sure about these kinds of things before driving with a risk of explosion. After that, we just drove with the emergency valve closed every time. Better to be overly safe than to be in pieces.
The next day we went to beautiful caves, a honey farm (where I bought some nice honey as a gift, but I only found out later that it wouldn't be allowed on my next trip (New Zealand), so yeah, that was a bit of a shame : ( ). We also drove into a ditch... What's a holiday without problems, so to speak. Miraculously, we got out without tipping over (although it almost seemed that way) and without any major damage.
We drove on to Cradle Mountain, where we had a great walk, watched, took photos, and spotted wombats in the grassy landscape! At the end of the walk, we caught a bit of rain, but luckily the shuttle bus came to rescue us quickly. After cooking some truly delicious meals, we all had a cozy movie night in a double bed because it was cold. That's how we fell asleep, haha.
Videos:
The next day we did some more driving around, made a pit stop in a small village and looked around the historic ish train station.
While we were driving, the weather transformed into a true winter wonderland, as it was snowing!!!!! I was, of course, thrilled, because it was snowing! We stopped for a bit and built a snowman together and threw some snowballs. Yeeeeey!.
We also went for a walk along waterfalls and finally saw a wild echidna (a hedgehog-like creature) and a whole bunch of wallabies! That evening, just before bed, there was a nice surprise on the window curtain. A rather large spider had hidden itself there, camouflaged beautifully. We caught the spider and brought it outside, where Cynthia and I looked at it for a bit. It's a pretty cool creature. We looked up what it was, and they said that spider often hides in forests (check), crawls into campers (check), and hides in curtains (check).
The next day we went to an apple cider company that also had a small museum dedicated to it. We also explored Hobart a bit (Abel Tasman is mentioned on a statue!) and finally flew back home.
