Dover to Strahan

Wow – I have been really slack with my story writing and somehow managed to get through the whole of December and half of January with nothing to report. I can assure you that there has been plenty on, and I’ll try to catch up with this (and following) post(s).

When last I posted, we were in Dover and dealing with the family Covid outbreak. Thankfully that passed (the kids were crook for only a couple of days) without impacting us too much in the long term. I have certainly had a lingering lethargy (and will happily blame Covid for my slack reporting about our activities). Sarah also had lingering crookness, but is clearly more dedicated and pushed through to keep working as well as posting and all of her other tasks.

From Dover we headed to Strahan (via Dog Fest in Hobart to pick up Jett) and that was a pretty big moving day. We didn’t have a full pack up to leave Dover, since we were in the house there, but it was a long drive (and very cold when we were crossing the range) and we were flying a bit blind with the camping at the Strahan end.

When we arrived in the general area, we followed our noses out to where the camping was to be, along a very narrow, rough and wet track along the water front. We eventually got to the limit of our 4WD capability with the track heading up a steep sand dune that was too much for our vehicle and trailer combination. Fortunately there was a great site right there, and we proceeded to set up camp and make ourselves at home.

We stayed in Strahan for five nights, venturing out of our secluded camp to visit Zeehan and the town of Strahan, but not much else. It is a pretty isolated place on the west coast of Tassie, and we enjoyed the seclusion and nightly fires, an the occasional spot of sunshine, but mostly the weather was cold and wet, continuing our Tassie weather theme.

I had done a fair bit of exploring on my morning walks with Jett, venturing further along the track where we weren’t game to push the four wheel driving capability of the car, and I came to the conclusion that we could probably get into the track in the car from the other end. We tested it out one day, and tested the car much harder than we wanted, and the track was still too hard-core for us to manage (it should be noted that our vehicle is 12 years old and has done 330,000km + so we try not to push it too hard).

While Queenstown is a place of interest for many people, we passed through it on the way to Strahan and decided that we didn’t need to go back there for a closer look. We had previously planned to spend another five or so nights somewhere else on the west coast, but then came to the conclusion that we’d probably seen the best of it, and that we could explore the north-west corner (Tarkine) from somewhere near Stanley. So that is where we headed next, to a camping area on The Black River on the north coast of Tassie, not far from Smithton and Stanley.