Well we were alone again, so with our washing done we were off to Tasmania. We landed in Hobart on the 17th of November. 2 things right away, it's not 35C and it's raining!!! It was actually really nice to have a break from the heat and the desert. We hung around Hobart for a couple of days and checked out the beautiful historic waterfront and ate in these cool floating fish and chip shops. They unload the days catches and cook them up right there! Awesome. With our bellies full of good fish it was time to head to the bush and we spent a magical 3 days on the Freycinet Peninsula. The days were beautiful and sunnie and the water was perfect but don't even think about swimming, it's about 7C!! The wildlife on the island was so tame!! We had Wallabies with Joeys, Pademelons and Roos in our campsite. One nite we even had a possum try to get into the tent to get our food. I unzipped the tent and told him to piss off and he reared up and hissed at me!! Cheeky bugger. From Freycinet we went down to the ruins of the Port Arthur Penal Colony. That's also the place where that guy went nuts and shot 35 people in the late 90s. Port Arthur was great, we liked it so much that we came back at nite and did  lamplight ghost tour complete with tales of horror and photographic evidence. It was all really well done. With just a couple of days left in Tassie we shot up to Lake St Claire National Park where we say our first Platypus and had our first run in with the weather. During the nite a big storm blew a tree over right accross from our tent! It got down to around zero that nite so between the cold and the falling timber we didn't get a lot of sleeping done. That was our Tassie send off and a couple of days later we were back in Melbourne with Brad and Michelle (Cheryl's Brother and his girlfriend) and then off to the Snowy Mountains of "the Man from Snowy River" fame. We stayed in a little town called Buchan on the first nite and met some local wildlife rescuers. Cheryl talked them into letting her look after their 2 month old Wombat named Willfull for the day. The thing spent all day inside Cheryl's jumper sleeping and took his 4 hourly bottle feeds just like a baby! I don't know who enjoyed it more, Willfull or Cheryl!! We did a lot of hiking and exploring in the Snowy's, and saw a lot of snakes!! Big black ugly snakes but they always just slithered away as soon as we got close. We scrambled around some caves too and just generally got messy. On the way out of the Snowy's we got caught in a Tornado!! Yes the "there's no place like home" variety. We could see the funnel forming accross the lake we were driving around so we parked up next to the rocks in the deep part of a blasted out roadway. The win was unreal but we were really sheltered. The big surprise came when we drove out of our hiding place and the road was covered in massive trees and there were trees down on farm houses and even a huge water tank that had blown down onto the road. All the traffic was stuck so we all mucked in and started clearing the roads. It took us hours to get through but it was pretty exciting looking back. Next stop was the Hunter Valley where we did some wine and beer tasting and met up with Cheryl's dad who happened to be in the area on business. Only 700km to go from there so it was drive, beach, drive up the coast and home again in Brisbane.!!!!! Check out the photos and let us know what you think.

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