Tuesday 17 September 2024 – We had to depart Tasmania yesterday, after 12 days and 1200km of travelling across and around the island. It was cold and windy most of the time, wet for some of the time, and even sunny for some of it – but we really enjoyed our time there. All we had to do for today was to get ourselves to Hobart airport, return the hire car and catch a Virgin Australia flight to our next destination – Canberra, the capital of Australia.

So, we bade a final farewell to the hotel’s fine view over Coles Bay

and drove the 220km to Hobart via some more attractive east coast scenery

and a brief stop at the “Spiky Bridge”, which is near a town called Swansea (to get to which you drive past Pontypool, I might add).

This is a convict-built bridge, with, erm, spikes along the top.

No-one knows why.  If you look closely at the mortar, you can see the shells incorporated to provide calcium

which shows that material was probably taken from an aboriginal midden, similarly to what we saw at the Henry Jones Art Hotel in Hobart.

The popular legend is that the Spiky Bridge was built after a chap called Edward Shaw offered the Superintendent of Rocky Hills Probation Station, Major de Gillern, a ride home one night after a game of cards. Shaw intended to highlight the hazards for Tasmanian travelers and wanted improvements made to the road between Swansea and Little Swanport. Rather than wait patiently for his repeated requests to be granted, he raced the Major home at breakneck speed through the gully to prove his case. Needless to say, the bridge was erected shortly after.

The bridge was the last diversion on our airport journey, and we arrived wondering if VA could find any more ways of buggering us about, our anxiety stemming from when we tried its online check-in and it wouldn’t recognise the credentials we provided. We therefore joined the VA check-in queue and it turned out that they’d tossed only a minor googly in our direction; the flight was being fulfilled by Link Airways, we were too early for their check-in and so should wait fifteen minutes and queue up over there, no just there, to complete the process.  So we got ourselves coffee and whilst Jane guarded our prized place at the head of this check-in queue, I went off to do a slightly better job of getting a photo of the devilishly charming art installation in the airport’s baggage collection area.

The queue for security was a bit of a zoo

and the flight’s departure was slightly delayed but otherwise everything went smoothly until the landing, which the captain accurately warned us would be lumpy due to high winds. A taxi whisked us swiftly to our hotel, the QT, which was behind a maze of construction work

which, we were told, was part of construction of a new light railway and had been going on for quite some time. We were a little dismayed to find that our second-floor room looked out over these works, which are due to start at 7am daily; so Jane had a chat with the receptionist and he was kind enough to relocate us to the sixth floor, looking the other way (our room, not the receptionist). So I’d like formally to apologise to whoever got room 215 for the night of 17th September.

After a bite to eat and a glass of something cold we went out for a bit of a stroll, obviously, round the back of the hotel

where some sulphur-crested cockatoos were tucking in to some yummy grass

and when we got back we found that our relocated room gave us a great view of the sunset over Black Mountain.

We have a “day at leisure” tomorrow in Canberra, and the weather forecast is good: 18°C and sunny. I wonder what we’ll do with the day?