I am updating the blog with day 2 info today on day 3 of our trip, because we had no 3G reception at all, and no Internet. Today I still don’t have Internet access with my laptop (Optus) but do have Internet with my iPad (Telstra). So using my iPad I can type into my blog, but can’t post photos. Tomorrow night (day 4) I’ll be in Hobart and will be able to post some photos then.

With that out of the way, I can write about day 2!

After leaving Launceston at around 10am, we decided to go North to Beaconsfield to visit the mining museum there. It looked like a great place for photos and it was. We did stop a bit on the way there to photograph the landscape, even took a scenic drive which was a small diversion.

We saw two guys at the museum who were from our Sydney to Launceston flight. I remembered one of them because he was told off at the airport for taking photos of the plane on the Tarmac, and he was behind us in line at the car rental place at the airport.

The museum was interesting, but I can’t post photos today from the ipad. After Beaconsfield we headed for Moina and the lemonthyme lodge where we were staying. We stopped for a while in Sheffield on the way to photograph the murals. The photos will make it to the blog soon.

Lemonthyme lodge is about 45 minutes from Sheffield, the last 8kms is on an unsealed winding mountain road, which was slow going at 30km/h. The car rental place is going to have a fit when they see the dirty car, maybe we’ll wash it in Hobart.

Our cabin was large, it was really great. It had two large bedrooms with king sized beds, a kitchen, bathroom of course, and a big lounge room and dining area. One of the bedrooms was in an upstairs loft, we slept in that one because it was a novelty.

Everything else about the place was not so good, and I wouldn’t recommend the place to anyone, although it got HUGE RAVE REVIEWS from the travel agent who apparently personally stayed there. It would probably be fine if you take your own food, since there is a kitchen in the cabin.

We got there just after 2pm, which is fine since check-in is at 2pm. 2pm is also the time that they stop serving lunch. So if you are a hungry traveller, waiting to have lunch at this fantastic resort, you can’t eat. If you want food, you have 2 choices. You can go back to Sheffield, 45 mins away where you just came from, driving more on the 8km gravel road making the car 3 times more filthy than it already is, or the girl can “see if someone in the kitchen can make up a cheese platter”. Of course I chose to starve until dinner time, and bought 2 chocolate bars, and LittleB reluctantly ordered the cheese platter. Not right away, maybe half an hour after saying no.

Dinner was ok, but if it wasn’t my first meal of the day I probably would have liked it less. Breakfast was really pathetic, especially for the price (which is something that we normally don’t care about) but when you pay 5 star Sydney hotel buffet prices, and don’t get a buffet for cooked food, but instead get one skinny sausage, one slice of bacon, 2 eggs and a shriveled cooked tomato (small half) and have to ask for sauce, you feel disappointed. Nobody was serving coffee, but you could eat as much cereal and toast as you wanted!

We were fine for cash, but if you needed an ATM, the nearest one is in Sheffield. These are the things you find out only when you get there, along with that none of the phone lines work most of the time, including the office phone. LittleB tried to get the coin phone to work for more than an hour before it suddenly worked.

If you book on lastminute.com like the woman checking out in front of us did, take every evidence that you have that you have actually paid for the room, or you could pay for it all again before you are allowed to leave. Actually she did have evidence, but there was still a problem. The stand off went so long that it took more than 20 minutes for a compromise to be made, and LittleB could get her chance to check out, then she had to pay for our dinner and mini-bar, and all of the phone lines were down again so there was no EFTPOS. The choice was to wait around until the line suddenly worked again, which could be a minute or hours away, (wasting our holiday time) or leave all of her credit card details there so they could charge anything they liked once she’d gone and couldn’t sign for it. She couldn’t trust them after they tried to rip off the previous woman. Fortunately she remembered cash, and I was carrying enough, so all was good. I don’t know how they can run a business with such shitty phone lines.

I realize I’ve blurred a bit of day 3 into the post (checking out of the lodge) so I’ll start a day 3 post now. It’s faster to type with the iPad than I thought.