September 7

Monday 7 September

We enjoyed bit of a sleep in this morning and a slower start. We were going to have a proper catch up with Loraine this morning (when she’s not busy being a publican) but poor girl was up most of the night coughing and was feeling very unwell. So we’ll catch up with her some more when we get back later in the week.

We had bit of a chat with Elizabeth (one of her employee’s) beforehand and she was telling us how Ringarooma has only had 5 fine days during August and that’s all that’s predicted for September as well. Apparently they had 26 inches of rain in August too which is close to their usual annual rainfall. No wonder they are sick of the rain at the moment!

The scenery looked gorgeous this morning when we headed off and the clouds were so low in places that it looked as though you could almost reach up and touch them.
We caught up on some phone calls when we got to Launceston and kept going towards the west. We went through Deloraine and found it to be a nice little place.

From there we stopped in at a raspberry place before we went on to Sheffield, also known as the town of murals. Some of the murals are fantastic. There’s so much detail in them.

There’s an interesting story painted on the side of one of the stores about the founder of Coles supermarkets. A friend of Mr G J Coles owned this particular store called Slaters and one day, Mr Coles asked his friend would he go into business with him and his sons who were starting a store in Melbourne. Mr Slater couldn’t be persuaded and his store still stands in the little town of Sheffield today. Mr. Cole’s new business venture went on to become a national chain of supermarkets that turns over a colossal amount of money each year. I wonder how Mr Slater felt about that decision as Mr Coles business went ahead in leaps and bounds.

After Sheffield we went to Latrobe and had bit of a gander through a place called Reliquaire that had all kinds of dolls, clowns, mannequins, bears of all different types n shapes n breeds that you could imagine. There were ones that looked like old people, some that were of witches, goblins, skeletons, peter rabbit, and other various characters from books. They also had games of all descriptions, science stuff and some specialty foods from the area.

We decided we take a look at the Platypus House either tomorrow or on our way back to Ringarooma as it was getting later in the afternoon.

It didn’t take us long to get to Devonport as it’s only 13 kms from Latrobe, so we had a brief drive around there and when we couldn’t find anything we were looking for easily (and without a map) we decided to leave Devonport for another day too and headed for Burnie.

Burnie is only a half hour drive from Devonport and the highway runs alongside the ocean for much of the way, making it a very pretty drive. We found a place to stay for a couple of nights, downloaded a squillion emails and went out to find some dinner. I kinda felt like Chinese food and we eventually found a Chinese Restaurant.

A little tip ~ if you’re ever in Burnie TAS, do NOT go to Fortuna Garden for a meal. Omg, they had not only the worst Chinese food we’ve ever had, but they were also by far the most expensive. We couldn’t eat it all, so ended up leaving and heading to KFC instead. Ah well, such is life!