This week we have enjoyed travelling down the Midlands highway to the south. We have stopped at many interesting and quaint towns that show individual parts of Tasmania's history. These include Woolmers estate which houses the life and times of the Archer family as passed down from Thomas I to Thomas VI who died and left it to trust, it is a National Heritage Estate and some of the furniture in the house dates back to the 1840's from England. The grounds has the oldest working wool shed and also the National Rose Garden, which is lovely.

We also trvelled through Campbell where the main street has a paving brick laid for each of the convicts that came out here. There name, age, crime, punishment and ship are inscribed on the bricks, so we walked along reading them and their sorry tales. There is a brick bridge there that was built by the convicts in the 1830's and it still stands today as is. There were some amazing tree carvings here too, symbols of the area carved out of the branches as you can see in the photo.

For those who might be following on a map, we stayed in Oakland and then went on to New Norfolk just northwest of Hobart. From here we visited Mt Field national park and saw Russell Falls (picture) - tried some new shutter speed changes with the camera to get some good photos! and Horseshoe falls, as Molly said, it looks like a horse shoe, that's why they called it horse shoe falls, oh really! Amongst intermitent rain we drove 16km up to Lake Dobson, (945m) this is all yesterday. It was really cold when we got there and we had lunch in a shelter all huddled around our little gas stove. When we started down in dense clouds and Darren commented it was so cold he wouldn't be surprised if it hailed, true to form, 10 minutes later there was some light hail. Gee it was cold, and it was hard to imagine Perth sweltering in the record breaking hot dry spell at the same time.

From there we drove out to Gordon Dam (60km into the western wilderness, miles and miles of hills, forests and windy roads - it was all beautiful), the dam with the largest catchment area in Australia and the wall stands 178m high. The brave and courageous half of the family -Darren, Jerome, Josie and Molly - walked across the massive wall, while those less brave - Grace, Sophia and I thought it too chilly and too scary, we took the photos and then sat in the car to keep warm! Even Darren said it really was soooo high from up there it made him a little nervous. see photos

This morning we woke and the temperature wa 4.4 outside, 8.1 inside the van, a little chilly, but the sun came out and the day warmed up fast making it lovely to drive through Hobart and further south through to Franklin. We will spend a few days looking about right down at Cockle Creek - they say when here you are closer to the Antarctic than you are Cairns, wow! and then head up to Kingston to spend some time with Warren and Sarah Wieske and their family. We can't wait to see some friends whom we know, after a month now, we are looking forward to familiar faces!

Cheers to all