Little Trips | Strahan
I've been a bit bad at blogging lately. I don't have my office space set up properly yet and over the last week our office has doubled as a spare room while my mum stayed with us. We had a great time with her here (although I think C is relieved as she likes to be very cheeky to him and says lots of mean things to him) and it was lovely to see her interacting with Theo and him enjoying her company and we took some nice drives with her and had lots of good chats. She has some pretty incredible stories from her formative years, especially from the years when she used to ride around with bikers in Western Australia when she was about 18. On the drive to Strahan she shared lots of her stories from that period and I had this beautiful image of my mum with her long blonde hair, on the back of a blue Ducati that was loaded up with lots of bags, riding through the Nullarbor Plains, with a tough biker on the front, and my mum trying to read a book and only being able to read every right hand page because when she'd try to turn the pages they'd rip out and fly off into the desert (a true story). Only my mum could turn riding around with tough bikers into something cute and dorky. I love her stories and I hope she gets to write some of them down before her memory goes. She's a really incredible person.
I have a Pinterest board dedicated to places in Tasmania I want to visit and the West coast was high on that list and somewhere we hadn't taken my mum, so I was really excited to go there. We initially planned to visit Cradle Mountain on the way back from our trip to Strahan and go for some nice rainforest walks there, but we didn't get a chance - the drive was several hours long each way and Theo made us stop frequently, although when we'd stop we'd always find a great lookout and were kind of grateful for his whinging!
Before we left we went to the Harvest Markets in Launceston and got some delicious Wanderlust pies and a big punnet of blackberries which Theo enjoyed!
The whole drive was amazingly picturesque and there were such varied landscapes - desolate plains, lush rain forests with leafy canopies over the road, enormous pink granite mountains, winding cliff-side roads, burnt out forests, grassland moors, barren hills, alpine highlands, rocky scrub and hulking, majestic mountain sides. The wind on the West coast could knock you off your feet and much of it is blanketed in snow in colder months and totally uninhabitable. Since I've been home I can't stop thinking about the landscapes.
Near Queenstown.
Penguin Cradle Trail.
An amazing house in Queenstown.
Queenstown.
Black Bluff, Middlesex.
My mum and I freezing on a platform at Gormanston, freaking out about seeing lightening all around us!
Gormanston.
A burnt out inn at Gormanston. The water is full of tannin.
Queenstown's famous gravel football oval.
Gormanston.
Gormanston.
Queenstown.
Strahan.
Gormanston.
The theatre in Queenstown.
Black Bluff, Middlesex.
A sweet house we saw in Queenstown.
We stayed at a lovely boutique cottage in Strahan and ate delicious pizza on the harbour when we finally got in. I wish that we had had more time there - driving through the amazing landscapes was wonderful, but it would have been nice to be able to explore a little more - next time!
