Today we had an extra daughter. Danielle, Bernie and Alison’s youngest daughter – who’s nearly the same age as Melyssa – didn’t want to do the superman walk the rest of her family were going on, so she asked to spend the day with us instead, since we weren’t being quite so active. And because Melyssa and her are friends anyway ;-)
We started the day with a cruise on Lake St Clair. The boat was a tiny little thing – not quite what we all imagined.
The skipper was equally unexpected. She was in her mid-twenties, casual, somewhat of an in-doorsy type. Kath says she was a bit of ditz too. I kind of expected a big guy on that boat to handle the backpackers packs and so forth. Once we were finally going, the engines cut out several times. Each time she gave us some unintelligible reason, assured us they’d be fine, and restarted them. No problems. She’s the kind of person they say, if she was any more laid back, she couldn’t get up in the morning.
She took us to Echo Point. No, it doesn’t have an echo, instead, all the land features around the lake are named after Greek mythology, and she told us the legend of Echo. Here’s a photo of us at Echo Point:
Danielle isn’t in this photo. The captain – who took this for us - asked us whether we wanted our other daughter in the photo. This caused general hilarity, and for the rest of the day, Danielle called us “Mum” and “Dad”, and later in the evening, she called her own parents “Auntie” and “Uncle”. They were as weirded out as we were!
The final stop on the boat trip was to pick up an overflow of backpackers coming off the Overland Track (Lake St Clair is the end of this 4-6 day trail that comes down from Cradle Mountain – the walk we did there is the start of it). The captain threw the fully loaded packs around as if they were empty. I was impressed. Kath sniffs and says, it was rude when the men offered to help her.
After this we had lunch at the visitor’s centre, and then we went on an aboriginal culture walk. The walk itself was a nice walk – just a bit too challenging for Tali, who ended up on my shoulders, but there was hardly any actual aboriginal culture in evidence – which I suppose is fitting given how hard Tasmania tried to expunge it in the 18th Century. At the end of the walk, we spent half an hour playing in the creek.
In the afternoon, it was windy – like almost every other day here in Tasmania – so we took it easy, and the girls played in the lake. Our campsites were checked out fairly thoroughly by a rather friendly Padmelon, with a joey in the pocket.
lovely family pic guys :)
ReplyDeleteCheryl