March 2017 – Page 2 – Head in the Clouds

Settling Back in to Civilisation!

So the day starts out pretty normal at Norwich House.
First things first, catch a bird that somehow got inside and pop it back out, have breakfast then make the monumental decision about the hiking clothes. To wash or burn.
Of course we washed…
It was a gorgeous day so all the laundry dried happily in the sun and breeze.

We aimed to take today nice and easily – although for me that meant diving into the garden to see what was going on!
Wow on the tomatoes

Just one of the many tomato patches with ripe fruit!

Even though my lovely cousin Beau ate through as many as he could and shared around heaps and took home a bag full – there were countless more in the garden to pick today.

I have managed to put 6lb of the tomatoes chopped into the starting point of making relish, but will need my market stall out the front early tomorrow to help deal with the rest.
Rachel helped me set it up later this afternoon – we got $7!! Yay 😀

Some monster beetroot in there! Time to make more pickled beetroot.
There is so much corn ready. Will put a good amount of that out the front tomorrow too!

Seems I have an hour of chilli cutting and deseeding ahead of me tomorrow as well!

I am dying to get into my hiking photos but, as always after such a trip, there is a lot of cleaning up and sorting to do of your gear and general house/garden stuff to attend to.

Not to mention how tired I seem to be right now!! Still a few hours sleep to catch up on I reckon!

Dinner was amazing tonight. We really missed our fresh food. I have to say, the corn is divine!

Cheers!

Home. Safe, Sound & (slightly) Skinnier.

Hello!! Did you miss me?? 😀

Wow… It’s hard to know where to start describing this 65km hike (40 miles). It was amazing, beautiful, tough, stunning & challenging.
We did 6 days traipsing through an incredibly diverse landscape, with tracks that varied from boardwalks to natural paths, boulder scrambles, tree-root lined & swampy puddles.

We lucked out with the weather! Only one rainy misty day which really was beautiful in itself.

I have so many photos to share! Be afraid!
We got back home last night (Sunday evening) after picking up our car at the end, then diverting back to Cradle Mt to collect the car we dropped ourselves off with. We had the most beautiful shower in the world and slept like the dead!

I did take time to choose 5 images out of over 1000 to quickly share. I have a lot of work ahead of me to sort the rest!
I figured I would give you a day by day post about what happened and a second back up post for the remaining photos from that day for the die hard among you that want to see an excessive amount of images!

But for now… there is a whole garden of tomatoes to pick and laundry to get done!

Cheers!

Zip-Lock Bags Are My New Best Friends

Hello!
Wow – today was meant to be relaxing!!
I don’t think I am relaxed.
I am about to dive off to bed, but wanted to speed blog and say “See ya” for a week!
Thank-you for all the well wishes!

Apart from running about on last minute shopping errands, saying toodle-oo to Margie & Ruby and making $21 on my stall… doing the final pack was the aim

Its amazing how little you thought you had started with, then how much you decide to take out of that little amount and STILL end up with 18kgs!!

Taking away food for the moment and concentrating on culling clothes even further

All clothes – including jacket have been squashed into the green compression bag!! Not bad.

Every ounce counts. We wanted deodorant…

That will be enough and if not – too bad! 🙂

Toiletries – both our toothbrushes, toothpaste, facewasher, cotton buds, deodorant and medication. Soap is in dish washing kit.

Seriously – I don’t know how I am going to cope without my hairbrush and make-up!! … Oh wait… snicker – I was built for this!

Food!! Left to right. We ditched the cup-of-soup packs. We didn’t ditch the chocolate.
Coffee, sugar, powdered milk, beef jerky (home made)
Breakfast. Top two packs are mine. Weet-Bix. Other packs are Jeffs muesli mix
Dinner – dehydrated vegetable mixes with two minute noodles and curry beef with rice.
Muesli bars – for snacks
Lunch – pita bread which will have mayo, relish, tomato & cheese

More compact packing with less packaging.
What you take in you take out.

My bag is chokkas! Had to leave one lens behind.
Jeff’s bag and mine are about the same weight. He has the tent, I have most of the food. My advantage is that my pack will lighten daily!!! Cool!

Right! Don’t miss me too much. Hopefully if all goes well I will be back in a week with a ridiculous amount of photos to share!

Take it easy!
Cheers

A Bit of a Drive

Hello!! How was everyones Sunday? Madly busy or nice and relaxing??

We had a gorgeous day driving down to the end point of our upcoming Overland Track hike.
It was a beautifully scenic drive down to Lake St Claire. During the hiking season, hiking traffic goes one way. Starting up at Cradle Mt and hiking down. Hikers can avoid the extra track fee and hike in either direction during the winter season. (brrrr)

Because of the bus inconveniences, we left one of the cars at the visitors centre and hope it will still be there and in one piece for when we finish the hike!!
We put a bag with clean clothes, towels, shampoo in there ready and waiting. We also went to the supermarket and bought some cake, bikkies, juice packs etc to enjoy when we stagger in next week.

Day 7 you can hike the 17km around the lake or pay to take the ferry across. We are being stingy and walking. Actually we just felt we would be cheating ourselves out of doing it properly if we didn’t do the last bit.

It was grey and gloomy today. Not too cold though.
It rained last night. Not the sweet pitter-patter rain. The belting down with a vengeance rain. I was lying in bed telling it to get it out of its system! haha

If you squint you can see in the below photo Jeff and Rachel standing on the jetty.
They were ignoring me jumping up and down waving my arms like an idiot… so I just took their photo.

The drive back up was also really scenic. We did a loop, just to mix things up a bit!

Just outside Lake St Claire we picked up a stray

Katherine from Germany was hitching a ride back up to Launceston. While we weren’t going all the way, we got her to the Bass Hwy where apparently she got her second lift and into where she needed to go. (See? The bus thing! Not convenient!)

Actually it was really great. She was a lovely girl, funny and interesting. (I mean – she hiked Cradle Mt with a HULA HOOP!!! Who does that?? Just fabulous and very unexpected. We were thinking of taking a pack of cards to amuse ourselves in the evenings but now I am feeling a tad boring.)

We fed Katherine cake and got all sorts of first hand information about her experiences up on the hike which has made us re-evaluate a few things of what we were planning to pack/carry.
All in all, a good experience for us all!

Anyway – I am bushed! Time for some bed for me.
The final pack tomorrow and squeeze in a cuppa with Ruby & Margie!

Cheers!

Jeff’s photo out the car window as we zoomed along

Busy Busy

The outside tomatoes really starting to perform!

Hello! Weekend it is and things are really busy – Only a couple more days before we head out on our hike, so there just seems lots of tasks to attend too.
Nothing really exciting to photograph and blog about. Finishing up the housework, culling items from packs, going over food, quietly panicking – that kind of thing.

Picked up Rachel from the airport this afternoon and its been fabulous catching up and brainstorming about things we are taking/not taking.
It’s the first time she has been here in the proper harvesting season, and as a vegetarian, had a simply wonderful time going and picking food for dinner!

I have done one more vegetable mix tonight – which is cooking on the stove right now – and will dehydrate tomorrow.

Actually tomorrow is slated to be a pretty big day. The hike ends at Lake St Claire. There are no real bus/public transport options to collect hikers and get them back to civilisation. The private companies cost a fair bit (around $130 per person) and take you down via Hobart then back up to Launceston – which is STILL 2 hours from home and there is only one bus per day from Launnie over to here.
All. Too. Hard.

Since we still have two cars (we bought Margies car and planned to sell ours) we figured we would do the car shuffle ourselves. So we’ll drive down to Lake St Claire with both vehicles, leave one (filled with clean clothes and treats like chocolate and biscuits)(and shampoo) hopefully ready and waiting for us when we stagger in on day 7 of the hike.

We are talking about a three and a half hour drive each way.

We decided to aim to do that tomorrow so we have Monday as a final pack day and rest day. (Afternoon tea with Aunty Ruby maybe???)

So – with luck I might have some nice snaps of the Lake St Claire area tomorrow for you!

Cheers!

Foraging

Hello!
It was our 10 year wedding anniversary today! And we very romantically went to the rubbish tip. (haha – just another of those jobs on the ‘to do’ list)
Among other things we did get back to our blackberry patch to see if anything was ready! (At the abandoned school – see here)

Sure was!

We only had an hour up our sleeves as Cousin Beau was meeting us at home so I could show him the run of the place and what he needs to do while he is here. He is pretty happy about all the vegies he will have at his disposal!! (Yeah, what I REALLY need is a few teenagers for a week or two to fang through our excess food! 😀 )(Actually Beau couldn’t stop laughing at how many tomato plants I have growing out there)

Anyway, plenty of ripe blackberries to collect!
Its a tricky job. Blackberries are one of the most massively defensive plants out there!! Some of the thorns are diabolical! The leaves have hooked thorns all the way down them! Gloves are hard to use because then its tricky to grab the fruit.
Basically its a steady as she goes kind of job that you don’t take your parents on because of the accidental swear words.
No matter how careful you are, they hook you!
But its worth it! The jam is great and I am looking forward to making blackberry ice cream!

Natural dyeing.

Two good sized containers worth today – hoping we get the chance to slip back before we head out on our hike.

Tonight I cooked them up and mooleyed them into pulp – so the jam etc will be seedless.

Into the freezer they go!
I love free food!

Cheers!

So Many Tasks

G’day! End of week fast approaching!
I don’t know about anyone else, but for me when the time approaches for going away, the list of annoying fiddly little jobs seems to grow longer and of course they are on top of all the regular stuff that needs to be done (Especially at this time of year)

I won’t dwell on the domestics (lets REALLY not dwell on me finally cleaning out the fridge properly)
We have to have two rooms ready. One for Rachel who is trekking with us and staying a few nights prior to going up the mountain. The other for Beau, our young cousin who is house sitting.
I figured I should take down the garlic that was hanging in the upstairs room for a start!

Stall update. Yesterday $30 & today $9!!
Still… I am happy as overall I am up to $138 and every little bit helps!

I had to go into Burnie today and get my travel insurance for Texas. I was going to get my visa too but I’ll do that later when I have all the extra information that was needed (Like addresses and phone numbers of my friends where I am staying etc!!)

Chillies… that didn’t take forever or anything…

All now cut and de-seeded and in the freezer. Sweet chilli sauce can be done later.

We got some more meals dehydrated, Jeff marinated some beef to make jerky tomorrow and also made extra muesli bars

mmmmmm doesn’t that look appetising!!!??

And on an exciting note, I received this lovely big box yesterday…

FULL of books!! Happy sigh!!

My awesome friend, Lasse has moved back to Europe and I was the recipient for his book collection. Sweeeeet!

Judging by all the shmoozles, Pip also seemed quite happy about our new books too!

Cheers!

Some Pretties.

Hello! Just thought I would share what is still blooming and showing colour in the garden.
Enjoy.

I hope your day is colourful and beautiful!
Cheers!

One Week To Go

Hello!
So far, I reckon Autumn weather has been much nicer than most of summer! Another lovely day today.
I put the stall up out the front before I had breakfast (no, don’t ask what time that was)
I got to talk to some really nice people – travelling workers. They were cherry picking, now moving on to apples.
Then found a couple of random European people wandering down the highway on their way to Wynyard! They had not long arrived in Tasmania and had work up at a nearby farm. So I ran them into town. (Safer)(And quicker)
Anyway, grand total of $42 today!

Well – its a week away… the big hiking adventure! I have succumbed to list writing again to make sure I have everything sorted.
I dehydrated more curried beef & rice (well… its still going)
I did another half hour on the bike (Bottom much less sore now, thank-you for asking 🙂 )
Cleaned the dining room. (yawn – very slowly because I kept finding other distracting shiny things to look at/do)

Then I thought I would feel good about myself if I pulled some weeds out.

The weeds in the duck yard garden where there is no seaweed mulch have gone crazy

Jeff said there is a LOT of seaweed down at our usual collecting beach right now. Deciding if I can fit in a trip to get a couple of loads before we leave…

I did a fair bit but was conscious of not over doing things as the last thing I need before heading up a mountain is a sore back!
Still – it was nice to see a couple of big weed-piles!

The pallet fence garden is going nicely. I relocated quite a few self seeded tomatoes in there – just because I could. They now have lots of little cherry tomatoes happening.

Not sure if we will get any apples this season. They might disappear like the plums did, which would be sad. Lots of windfalls… lots of codling moth… late ripening.
Still… we have very happy neighbour-sheep!

So – get to the end of the day, ready to finish off cooking dinner and the power goes out for over an hour. Handy. Sigh… was looking forward to that shower too!
Anyway, so we sat out in the sunroom and amused ourselves with hobbies and chatting.
Jeff has taken to carving and whittling. (and a much higher use-time on the vacuum cleaner)

He got some knives to help make spoons.

We have plenty of firewood… he practices on all different sorts

Yes that’s blood!! Sigh. More practice with his new sharp tools needed!

Jeff was telling me about a current patient who all the staff have been smitten with.
A sweet elderly lady (in her 90’s). Sadly its possible she will be with them until the end.
I asked if he wanted to take her in a bunny. (Of course yes!)

So I got one that I had nearly completed and finished him off

We have called him ‘Raaffie”

Hope everyones day has been lovely!
Cheers!

Haircut Day

For weeks now (ok, lets be honest, probably since I got here to Tasmania) Margie keeps looking sideways at my hair, sighing a bit and running her fingers through the tangled endy bits and acting all wistful
She is a hairdresser.
And the lack of attention I give my hair in her opinion borders on criminal.

This is why I have bandannas. I love my bandannas – I won’t cut my hair short but I hate it getting in my eyes, so it works for me.
Anyway… the ends were getting pretty much to dreadlock stage so I figured I better let Margie have her fun and having hair a little more manageable for the upcoming hike.
Really… I could do without returning home harbouring various flora and fauna in there from Cradle Mt.

Margie has cut my hair once before. Other than that, I have generally just yanked my hair around to the front and attacked it with scissors myself. (I really don’t care)(And did I mention I am one of the least expensive wives out there??)

There! All done! I swapped some eggs for the haircut – but reckon I should make up Margie a bit of special home made ice cream at some point.
I could have done this myself (er- not as neatly of course) but then where’s the fun in that, as we had coffee and a good long gossip!?!

I grossly under-calculated my earnings yesterday … I made $8 not $7.
People from Texas can tell me how many cups of coffee I can buy with that! haha
BUT – today was a LOT more exciting!
$49!!! How great is that?? I met a couple of the customers. One sweet old fellow was just browsing while his wife (seated in their car) and I chatted. He kept choosing stuff and handing over more money!
Another fellow bought stuff then immediately came back to get the rest of the tomatoes because his wife told him to. They really loved the Black Russian ones.
I gave him a complimentary cucumber.

And then we get to my favourite time of the day…