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Bad hair day.

Friday 24 April 2009
AustraliaTasmaniaDrivingWalking

After all that walking yesterday, it’s time to do some distance again. Today’s goal: Launceston. It’s the second biggest town in Tasmania (about 90.000 people).

The day didn’t start very well. I am a bit cranky today and nothing goes very smoothly. You know: things fall when they shouldn’t, nothing is where it should be and you forget everything you shouldn’t forget (like where you left your car key)… It’s a good thing I am traveling alone today ;-)

Perhaps this is all caused by the fact that the resort doesn’t offer breakfast. I think it is. Therefore first stop: any place that sells coffee. Since there are not a lot of towns here, the first option is Bicheno. I found a nice spot in the Bicheno harbor to have my coffee and my sandwich. Then I noticed that the waves were quite a bit higher then yesterday. And there’s far more wind today as well (hey, perhaps that’s the cause of the higher waves…).

According to the map I got with my car, there’s a lookout just north of Bicheno. And I got a nice booklet called “60 Great Short Walks” when I got to Freycinet park. According to this booklet, there’s a walk to that lookout. Okay, let’s go. Found it. And guess what?

Hey that’s a big improvement for my mood… Temperature outside: about 17 degrees. Temperature in the car: higher than the airco can manage :cry:

The roadmap of Tasmania is not very complex. There are only a few important highways that basically go around the island and connect all the major towns and cities. It’s not very practical to put more roads in: there are just no more towns and there may be mountains or rivers making it impossible to get to certain places.

The landscape looks very much like what you could see in the UK. Green hills and every now and then a few houses, some trees and rivers. Looking around there are a few things that are quite obvious: they have really black cattle here, there are a lot of sheep and they like to cut down trees as well.

On my way I noticed that there were more and more clouds coming in. The temperature was dropping as well. The weather is getting worse…

In order to make the trip a bit more interesting, every now and then I challenge my Tom Tom by turning into a road that’s on my map and should bring me (more or less) to the same destination as Tom is bringing me to. Sometimes Tom is very persistently stating “turn around”, “go back”. Most of the times because he doesn’t want me to go on this type of roads:

But they are far more interesting then the highway…

Well the closer I get to Launceston… just look at the pictures.

By the time I get there it’s raining and the temperature is down to 12 degrees… Combined with my current mood, that’s not good. Time to find the hotel and just forget this day…

The track of today:

Friday 24 April 2009

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