It was good thing that yesterday was our day to do the hike in the National Park. We awoke to another day of low lying cloud and drizzle so we took our time packing up after another fabulous breakfast and started to make our way to Launceston for our flight to Sydney later in the day.
As we made our way inland, the rain stopped and there were a few occasional patches of blue sky. Our first stop was at the Midlands village of Ross. An interesting town with lots of stone buildings from the mid 1800’s, built back in the penal colony times with convict labour.
Ross was also home to the Ross Female Factory, one of four female prisons in the colony. Only one building remains on the site that is currently undergoing archeological exploration. There are many descriptive signs and prisoner stories.
There is also the Ross Bridge, built by convicts in 58 weeks in 1836. Quite an impressive limestone structure. There are 186 stone carvings in the structure.
We also stopped at the Tasmanian Wool Centre which has many Australian wool products for sale and a nice wool museum explaining the evolution of the wool industry.
Next we visited another small village, Campbell Town. Like Ross, it also has a bridge constructed by convicts in 1838 but from 1.3 million red brick rather than limestone. These were all fired on site.
Down the main street sidewalk is a long row of new red bricks, each one detailing a convict, the year they arrived from England, the ship they came on, their crime and sentence. They were pretty tough on stealing back then!
We continued on to Launceston and went to Cataract Gorge, a walk along the steep South Esk River banks. You can tell it is fall….
We saw some fly fishermen and rock climbers before it clouded up and started to rain again.
Back to the car and we decided to head to the CBD for a late lunch. We didn’t realize that the Easter Weekend (this is Saturday) was such a big event. Just about every store and most restaurants were closed for the entire weekend! We finally found a nice place and had a leisurely lunch then made our way to the airport.
It was a 1250 km quick tour of Tasmania. You certainly could have no trouble spending a few weeks here.
It was about 1 h 20 min flight to Sydney and we landed at 8:30 pm in rain. We got lucky and the shuttle to our hotel was pulling in just as we exited the airport. Tonight we are staying just a few blocks away from the airport so we were able to get checked in and have a late supper before retiring for the night. An extra hour of sleep tonight as Australia goes back to Standard Time for the winter.
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