Tasmania 2015 Trip

Day 1 5/6 January 2015

Port Melbourne - Spirit of Tasmania - Devenport - Ulverstone - Braddons Lookout - LaTrobe - Mole Creek - Maracoota Caves - Cataract Gorge - Launceston

Well they said the Strait was "calm" last night but it still felt like riding a roller coaster at Luna Park all night! I fully expected that the Disco would be covered in salt spray this morning. Luckily not. We all had the best parking spots on the boat by pure luck. We were the 2nd car off the boat this morning at 6.30am. Rolling through quarantine..." No we don't have any frozen fish in our freezer...." we headed straight for Ulverstone and Shropshire Park.

Shropshire Park was instigated by 2 Tassie shipmates wanting to remember their lucky ship, Roy Cazaly Jr and Bob Boyd. Cazaly won a DSM in Shropshire shooting a Kamikaze out of the sky and in half. The son of the famous AFL Cazaly, he will always be remembers as the one that saved his bridge that afternoon in Jan 45. Shropshire Park is a living monument to that gallant ship and now others of the RAN. Sadly both have now passed away but their legacy will live on.

From Ulverstone, we drove up to Braddons Lookout. Named after a former Tassie Premier, it looks out over the most diverse growing region in Australasia. Everything from onions, potato, carrots, peas, beans you named it, they've grown it!!

From there, we regrouped with The Red Devils and Firefoxes at a town called LaTrobe for breakfast. We found a nice Banjo's bakery and refuelled for the day ahead.

Having decided that seeing it was a cracking day in Tassie that we'd throw today's itinerary out the window, we decided to head to Mole Creek and the Maracoota Caves about 100ks from LaTrobe.

The caves are millions of years old but were only discovered in 1906 by 2 bothers who kept it secret for 4 years. Some beautiful stalactites and mites and capped off by the Grand Cathederal in a massive open section of the cavern. The cave also boasts a large amount of Glow worms that kept the kids in awe of the rooftop. Lucky we all have thick skin - it was 9 degrees in the cave (so we found out at the entrance) and we were all wearing t-shirts and shorts!

Warming up having left the cave system, we decided to continue to ditch the itinerary and head to Cataract Gorge in Launceston. We were going there tomorrow but the afternoon was so glorious that it wasn't a hard decision to make to go explore this beautiful location and have a swim. It's only a 15 min walk from downtown Lauceston as well so these locals are extremely lucky to have this to use for free!!

Tonight we are camping in Launceston and getting re-acquainted to the travelling life and the jobs we all have to do for setup etc. Luckily all CMJs have fallen into their respective jobs very quickly and so we got set up pretty smartly.

Tomorrow we are exploring more of Launceston and it's offerings.