The rainy weather thwarted our original plan to stop at Freycinet National Park and walk to see Wineglass Bay on our way to St. Helens. Instead, we drove straight to the town deemed to be bustling by the tourism powers that be. When we arrived, we had to double check to make sure we were in the right place as the town we drove into was quiet and empty. Sure enough, we were in the right place, a lovely AirBnB rental house right on the water.

The next day, my birthday – woo!, we decided to get up early to head back to Freycinet to do the walk we’d wanted to do the day before. Jon and I both hate back tracking, but we didn’t want to miss out on such a highly touted tourist destination. We walked to the view point and then continued on down to the beach and a ways further, doing a loop back to the car park.

The walk paled in comparison to the Cradle Mountain hike earlier in the week in both difficulty and views, but it was still a lovely way to spend the day. That evening Jon cooked me a wonderful birthday dinner and we enjoyed our last night in our rental home.

Before heading away from the coast, we hit up the Bay of Fires beaches. This is another of the must sees per big tourism, rated as one of the most beautiful beaches in the world. I agree wholeheartedly that they are beautiful BUT can a beach that you can’t use for typical beach purposes – swimming, sunning, relaxing – really be the “best”? I don’t think so. What do you think?

After spending the morning driving on winding less than 2 lane roads to view beaches, we switched things up to drive on winding less than 2 lane roads to get over to Launceston. We finally came across normal roads as we got closer which I found more exciting than warranted. Fortunately, no super strong kangaroos tried to lift up our car along the way.

Big tourism briefly mentions that there is a gorge in Launceston that you can walk to from the CBD. Jon and I decided to check it out and found that in this case big tourism was seriously underselling things. The gorge is a terrific place to walk, a big park, a free public pool, a natural swimming hole, and more all located in actual walking distance from the CBD. I think it is one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen in a city.

We hoped to grab a few post cards and some souvenirs before heading back to Melbourne. Unfortunately, the entire CBD shutdown at 5 pm so nothing was open for us to spend our tourism dollars.

Then again, we probably would have spent $10…

We drove out of Launceston and onto the ferry in Devonport  for the return trip to Melbourne. Luckily it was a much smoother uneventful sailing and even more luckily it didn’t coincide with this.