jayneandmarty.com

Spent some time this weekend planning some holiday time for later in the year. We hope to wakeboard at Mulwala as much as we can before it gets too cold, and would also love a weekend at the snow (we haven’t been since our wedding in 2004), but I mean a lengthy holiday. A three to four weeker in maybe October or November.

Overseas is out of the question and so is flying any distance within Australia unless we sell our block of land for a REALLY good price. We can’t count on that, so we’ve narrowed it down to these touring holidays.

• NSW north coast via NSW south coast (i.e. rather than the Hume Hwy route). This would be a great trip. It’s about 3,000km return if our final destination is somewhere like Coffs Harbour.
• Drive around Tasmania. We’d take the car on the Spirit of Tasmania to Devonport and I reckon we’d do about 2,000km.
• The Murray River from start to finish. About 1,200km from Corryong to Goolwa, plus 400km to get to Corryong and another 800km back to Geelong via the coastal route.
• Vic east coast and NSW south coast. Haven’t calculated distances but I reckon on about 2,000km again.

Of those, we’d most like to go to Tassie. It would be the most expensive, as even though we’d save a heap of money by taking our car over (and not having to hire one) the ferry tickets are about $300 each return for a normal allocated seat. You can do it cheaper if you get a day sailing and stroll around the ship for 10 hours but the day sailings only run in summer.

Tassie would be awesome though. We’d start at Devonport, head west along the north coast through Burnie, Wynyard and Stanley to Marrawah, then take the dodgy road from Arthur River to Zeehan, make a quick trip north to Waratah and Cradle Mountain, then backtrack to Strahan. From there we’d follow the main road to Hobart, Huonville, Bruny Island and Port Arthur, then track up the east coast to Freycinet Peninsula, Bay of Fires and Binalong Bay before a bit of inland trout fishing, then Launceston and the Pipers River wine region and finally back to Devonport.

If we can somehow save the extra $600 that this trip needs over the others we’ll do it. I loved my four days in Tassie two years ago and Jayne keeps saying she’d love to take me to see where she grew up. Hopefully we’ll find a way.