Down to the bottom of the world (or Australia at least)

I was starting to think we’d been tracking pretty well in terms of things not going wrong on the trip. Unlike previous trips we (touch wood) haven’t needed the services of a tow truck or a hospital emergency department, with the hardest things to deal with so far being the cold, wet or windy weather. But things have unravelled a little bit in the last week or so…

Our last day in Hobart was spent cleaning, sorting and packing as we tried to cram everything back in the car again ready for departure. We were moving further south to Dover to help a friend Juliet who was expecting a very large delivery of stuff to an empty house. Things had already turned a bit pear-shaped there too as the delivery was still on the docks in Melbourne, so Juliet had to push her trip a week, meaning we wouldn’t cross paths after all. But, we were pleased to be able to help out by picking up a whole lot of click and collect stuff to take down there, and to be able to have a roof over our heads for a few more days too.

So we managed to fit all that, and most of our stuff in the car, minus the dog, who is extending his holiday in Hobart with his new doggy mates. The final step was to carefully shut the back window of the ute and step away from the packing when….smash….the back window broke into a million pieces. Surprisingly, the swearing was minimal, I think we were a bit stunned by the level of devastation. We didn’t have a lot of time to deal with it as we had tickets to the Crowded House concert (which was excellent by the way) so just walked away from it knowing that we’d need to deal with it in the morning.

The next day we spent a couple of hours cleaning up glass and trying to work out what on earth to do. Our careful packing needed a rethink, and a tarp, and somehow we managed to secure it all in there without the window. So off we went to Dover. Of course when we arrived there we had to unpack absolutely everything as we now had no lock on the back of the ute, but again, not the end of the world, just super-annoying.

The next day was a Saturday, and we’d already discovered after making a few calls that replacement windows for utes are actually quite hard to come by so it looked like we were stuck with the new arrangement until Melbourne (one month away). So off we went to Cockle Creek, which is basically as far south as you can drive in Australia. It’s a lovely spot and for once we had nice weather to go with it too.

After lunch we decided that we should tackle the walk to the beach even further south which was a not insignificant 15-16km return trip, estimated to take around 4 hours. Sure enough it took 2 hours to get to the beach, across varied terrain on a lot of boardwalks through marshland and over rocky tree covered hills. The beach at the end was worth the walk, and we could see, not too far away, the very end of Australia. Apparently at this point we were closer to Antarctica than we were to Cairns.

Two hours back again, which the kids did at a cracking pace and we could tick that off the list. On the Sunday, we went to Hastings Cave, 30 minutes down the road. They are quite spectacular, and we learned a lot about how they have been formed (over a really, really long time) during the 45 minutes we spent in the caves.

As part of your ticket you also get free entry to the thermal pools so we thought we better give that a go, even though the outside temperature was pretty cold and miserable. The water temperature was 28 degrees (allegedly). I think another 4-5 degrees would have made it much more pleasant.

That was it for the good weather though, so Monday was a school/work day while we watched the driving sideways rain on the windows. We’d also thought we’d found a local solution for the ute window too, until it all unravelled in the details around getting it done in time. Never mind, at least we think we know what we need when we get to Melbourne and can find someone to do it. So, it was after 9pm that night when we finally got to sitting around doing nothing and Jim mentioned he wasn’t feeling great. Better take a Covid test I said, and sure enough…

So now we’re a bit stuck here as the rest of us don’t fancy sharing a car or a tent with Covid-ridden Jim. But it might work out well for Juliet, assuming the slow-moving delivery has made its way off the Melbourne docks for this weekend!

At the end of the day, we were lucky with both our bits of bad luck in that the window broke while we were staying somewhere that had the wherewithal to clean it up (and it wasn’t raining at the time), and that we’re in a nice warm, dry house now to assist Jim in his Covid recovery. As usual, it could be worse! But the west coast will have to wait for a bit while we sort out all the dramas, hopefully we’ll be back on track by about Sunday or Monday and can head west for the last three weeks of our Tasmanian adventure.

Edit to add: One by one we’ve all been struck down by the dreaded ‘rona. We ended up staying in Dover until Sunday and have now moved on to a remote free camp outside Strahan on the west coast we were are well and truly isolating until we feel a bit better.