Observations

Loretta from Tasmania Campervan Rentals picks us up at our hotel just before 10:30am. This was ideal as it allowed us plenty of time beforehand to walk to Battery Point and nosh at the renowned Jackman & McRoss bakery/cafe.




We barely know a thing about Tasmania and already we have been wooed by the high quality food on offer. I have a spinach, tomato, caramelized onion and feta tart and Keir has poached eggs with spinach aioli on a toasted baguette. The cappuccinos are punchy.

Loretta shuttles us back out to the airport area where their base is and introduces us to Julie who is in charge of getting us on the road today. We watch a short video (a bit different than our experience with Cruzy!) about the campervan and how to use it, and get all the paperwork sorted. Julie then takes us out to the van to go through it in person.

The van has a different configuration than Scubby. The bed is in back of this one and the kitchen area up front. We're interested to see if it feels/works differently. It's also stick shift. Soon enough however, we are all kitted out and on our way to Richmond, the charming heritage village nearby.

In Richmond we discover that there is something wrong with the lock on the sliding door though. To the best of our figuring we guess that there is a key broken off inside of it, preventing our key from a)fitting into the lock and, b)it actually locking.

We call back to Loretta, and the maintenance fellow Graham gives us a few suggestions to try. It's a no-go though, so back we head to the base where Graham gets the tools out and indeed discovers that the lock is jammed with a broken key. It ends up being our very own trusty tweezers that remove the piece of key and, finally sorted, we head out for real - this time towards the East Coast - and Triabunna - where we can access Maria (pronounced Ma-Rye-uh) Island.

Some Observations Thus Far:
*Tasmanians have an even drier sense of humor than Kiwi's
*The roadkill is infinitely different (we have thus far only been able to identify wallabies - everything else is an unknown - maybe some echidnas, wombats and ????)
*The trees we have seen thus far are tall and sticky looking. Forests of them look almost bare and airy. The terrain looks scrubby.
*The roads here are all (so far) perfectly paved