Current read: The High Mountains of Portugal – Yann Martel.

With peach season over, no work on offer at the uni, and my Dad’s white cell count running amok, I decided to head south to Tassie to spend time with the fam. I couldn’t leave NSW, of course, without visiting the Murphy/Davies clan in the Blue Mountains. While there, Frank, her eldest son Dylan, and I, took a day out in Bondi to visit her sister Katie, and catch up with another friend Cathy, from her uni days. I find Bondi a bit overcrowded for swimming, but the setting’s so beautiful, you can’t help but appreciate it’s iconic status. Let’s face it, when it comes to picturesque, Bondi always delivers:

Frank and I also managed to both health-kick, and drink a sizeable quantity of alcohol during my visit. Life is good 👍.Frank and I have been friends for well over a decade, yet have never really had a chance to do much travelling together. Her kids have grown up a little now though, so we left them with Peter and hit the coast for a three day roadtrip to Melbourne, from which point I took my car to Tassie on the ferry, and Frank caught the train back to the Blue Mountains. We decided to take the coast road rather than the Hume Hwy because I’d never driven the Victorian coastline, and the NSW south coast is stunning. 

On day one, we drove from Lawson to Batemans Bay, via Rubie’s new digs in Wollongong and a fleeting visit to the farm.

Day two saw us stopping at every conceivable south coast town for coffee, cheese, yoghurt, fudge, lunch… all the goodies 👍.After a massive twelve hours, we arrived in Yarram, where the chef at the hotel cooked us up a delicious veggie curry (recommended) and we shared a pretty ordinary bottle of bubbles (not so highly recommended), chased by a better tasting beer from the other hotel down the road.That’s right, we did a pub crawl of Yarram’s two (countem!) pubs, but by 10pm both establishments had called last drinks and closed their doors for the evening, so we had to resort to drinking our BYO Baileys in the hotel lounge.  On day three we drove to St Kilda via Port Albert, the windmill farm at Toora and Wilsons Prom.We parted ways at dawn and I am now making the most of the mild conditions that constitute a Tasmanian autumn. Looking out at the serene countryside it’s hard to believe that Cyclone Debbie has just wreaked havoc in so many other parts of the country. These here are crazy times.

Next up – some pics of Tas…