Reintroduction to Tassie

Elias had his final outpatient dressing change on Friday.  The burns unit doesn't need to see him until September, and we have the feeling that everything has turned out just about as well as it possibly could have.  (Of course things would have turned out even better if we hadn't left a pot of coffee unattended on the stove in the first place.)

So we celebrated by taking a couple of day walks this weekend - nothing very ambitious, unless you happen to have a two-year-old who passionately hates to be carried.  That's Elias on our first outing in the picture above, at a spot where a line of ferocious dogs was part of the penal infrastructure back in the bad old days.

The track we walked on that first day was the best setting for a little-kid bushwalk that I can remember.  It was wide and smooth and easy for Eric to navigate.  It followed the tops of sea cliffs and accordingly gave up dramatic scenery.  And every couple of hundred meters there was a viewpoint that was securely fenced in, so that we could enjoy the feeling of being right on the edge of the cliff, without having to worry about the boys and gravity.

You can just see the figure of a guy at the top of the cliff in this pic - grey hair, dark shirt.  He's standing outside of the fence.  And what's he doing?  He's fishing.  Gotta love those Taswegians.  We talked to the guy, and he was completely unembarrassed about being caught in the act of lowering a baited hook from the top of a 150-meter cliff.  He even claimed to have caught one - 'my arm nearly fell off reeling it up!' he said with a smile.

And today we revisited one of our favorite family walks in the shadow of Mt. Wellington - the perfect spot for a picnic and walk in between the rain showers.

Lately I've been having the feeling that our experience of Tasmania is just like the "Alaska" experience that a visiting family might get from a year spent in Anchorage.   So this weekend wasn't any big adventure, but it felt like, after Elias' two stays in hospital, and the various distractions that came along earlier in the winter, like we were leaving the microcosm of Hobart behind, and reintroducing ourselves to Tasmania.