Like all good programmers, our holiday started counting on day 0, with us dragging ourselves out of bed at the crack of dawn in order to arrive at the Spirit of Tasmania early in the boarding process. Unfortunately, we did not arrive early enough – all the waiting space is long full. And it’s particularly unfortunate because a cruise ship has just docked before the Spirit of Tasmania arrived from it’s overnight trip, and the place is just chaos. After going around the block a few times, we gave up and went for a walk along the beach. We finally get to board 5 minutes after the ship was supposed to leave, and the ship finally left nearly an hour late.
The crossing was fairly quiet – the weather was good, with a light swell. We discovered to our surprise that there’s not a lot to do on the boat. The kids playground and games rooms were very disappointing, so we had to entertain the kids for the whole trip. Not only were we an hour late, the trip lasted an hour extra too.
Grrr.
By the time we got to Devonport at 8:15 pm, we were pretty tired, and looking forward to a quick trip up to Longford, our destination for the evening. But no, Tasmanian customs had other ideas. Every car that comes off the boat has to be ‘inspected’ – which seemed to be largely an honour system, in that they asked us whether we had any unmentionables such as apples (from, say, Tasmania). They insisted on me opening the boot – so I had to take the bike off – but when I popped the boot, the guy looked at all our stuff, and said, right, thanks. So why make my pop the boot so you could see what you could see without opening it? Beats me. Took us 45 min to get the front of that line, and we were about a quarter into the queue of cars getting off the boat.
But we did, finally, get to Longford, to our little cabin for the night.
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Because they like to feel important!
ReplyDeleteCheryl