Last days in Tassie, a selfie with Ned Kelly, & a sneaky quick run to Sydney

Pretend for a moment that it’s not the middle of June, and take yourself back to the second week of March instead. Where were you? What were you up to? What was the weather like? Do you remember? Now pretend you’re me and have so sorely neglected this blog that you’ve got to do exactly that – luckily we’ve taken about a million photos on this trip so I just cheat and go back through those to remind myself of the events I’m trying to capture!

Here’s a map of what we cover in this post – you’ll notice it’s in Google Maps, as we’ve now hit the maximum number of destinations allowed in WikiCamps, the app we were originally using to create the maps!

You can access a massive zoomable-map of our complete circumnavigation of Australia by going to our InReach mapshare, just click here.

Notice that the hood in this “on the road” shot is NOT yellow… 🙁

We toured around Launceston (or “Lonnie” to the locals) for a few days in our inferior rental car waiting for our brand new shiny pinion seal for the Bumblebeast, checking out the local sights, like Cataract Gorge.

The view from the chair lift – boasting the world’s longest single chairlift span at 308 metres (1,011 feet!)

My favourite person in the whole world taking a picture. Oh yeah, and a nice bit of scenery.

And since we weren’t about to do any four wheel driving, and couldn’t get too far away from town, we also ate ourselves into a minor food coma at a poutine shop we discovered, and the local raspberry farm (2 visits!).

Yep, that’s right – I said POUTINE SHOP!!! Non-Canadians may not understand, but we Canadians are pretty much raised on this stuff during our formative years. I used to have it for lunch once a week in high school, and once one enters their years of excessive alcohol consumption (21 to 25?), it’s a late night staple and a great hangover prevention.

Poutine shop in Lonnie – they import their cheese curds from Wisconsin (used to be Canada, until they ran into some sort of regulation issue, but Wisconsin is close enough for us!)

After all this gluttony we went to donate some blood – surely that burns like a ton of calories, right?? (Note: only joking, we do not ever donate bodily fluids or body parts in order to lose weight, yikes!!)

We like to time ourselves for our “Game of Bloods” friendly competition just between us — this was 470ml in 6m42s – whooping Nick’s butt of 470ml in 6m50s!! YEAH!!!

Nick donated plasma for the first time, which was cool – in this picture the light red stuff is actually his red blood cells being returned to him

So yeah, not a very adventurous last week in Tassie, but I suppose we can’t all be adrenaline and adventure junkies all the time, right?? (Especially not me, because I love going to bed before 9pm)

Last campsite in Tas, after we got the Jeep back with her fancy new pinion seal and just one day to spare until our ferry booking

Back over the Bass Strait on the awesome Spirit of Tasmania, into Melbourne for just one night, and off we went zooming to Sydney for a birthday party, and to have a few issues looked at on the Jeep that were worrying us (spoiler alert: turned out to be nothing big), before we put her through her paces at Jeep Jamboree up in the Glasshouse Mountains in Queensland over Easter weekend.

So happy to be back in the woods, back in the tent, back in the Bumblebeast

On the way to Sydney, of course we had to stop for a photo op with Ned Kelly, Australia’s most famous bushranger, mainly due to his “last stand” near the town of Glenrowan.

Nick posing with a replica of Ned Kelly’s armour in the Ned Kelly museum in Glenrowan

The Wikipedia article on Ned Kelly is quite comprehensive and has some great tales if you’re curious, but the main thing you need to know is that he and his gang dressed up in this makeshift/homemade armour and made a terrific mess during their final shootout against the cops, and finally Ned Kelly was tried and hanged by the neck until death.

His famous last words were (allegedly) “Such Is Life”.

I’m not sure why Ned Kelly is idolised – we first heard of him in our early Australian days, I think about six months in we were in a museum in Sydney and saw some paintings of him – but I’ve never been able to understand really why a criminal and murderer would be celebrated like he is. It seems to be that he was an underdog, and stood up against the establishment – a very Aussie trait!

After getting our Ned Kelly fix, we crossed the border into New South Wales, and the km’s passed quickly as we got closer and closer to Sydney.

The Jeep got more and more quiet as we approached – being back in Sydney was another huge milestone of this adventure, as it represented returning to our starting point. Even though at this stage we still had over three months ahead of us – it really felt like the trip was drawing to a close – and we definitely were feeling all the feels…