Rental Car Day!

Saturday we rented a car to go drive down to the Tahune Air Walk and other random adventures. Also gave Maria a chance to try driving on the other side before our week long trip to New Zealand. She said the main problem wasn't even driving on the other side of the road, but on the other side of the car. It probably didn't help that the car was a standard, even though she drives one at home, especially since the shifter was on the left-hand side too. We only had one short stall out luckily, and she seemed to get the hang of it relatively quickly, although she was still a little nervous. Don't worry guys, this picture is a fake scream. There were no accidents ;)

Unfortunately also, it was a verrrry rainy day, which is not exactly the best weather for a tree-top canopy walk in the rainforest. But somehow we managed, some of us better than others.
Yes, Morgan and I were wearing $4 raincoats that look like garbage bags with hoods. And I wish I could say these faces were made up, but those two were really petrified! Lol. It's because we were out on the very end of the airwalk, which was this like 50 foot jet out over the forest.

Later, we drove back to Hobart and on a whim ended up driving halfway up Mt.Wellington, only to find out that the top half was closed off because they were having a snow storm. Hah. I had actually been sleeping at this point and didn't particularly feel like being out in torrential rain so I stayed in the car while the other three went into the woods for about ten minutes. Upon their return it started hailing, like buckets and buckets of hail. It was completely crazy! I was certainly glad I stayed in the car!

From Mt. Wellington, we decided "Heck, since we have a car for once in our lives here, why not make the most of it!" And proceeded to drive another hour north to the historic village if Richmond to see the semi-famous bridge and old church. While checking out the random bridge, Morgan found it hard not to resist feeding the ducks that were standing nearby. Unfortunately for her, there were about a billion! ducks and other birds standing nearby who promptly began to chase her around the little field.
When we finally broke free from the crazed fowls, we went to see the old church up the road. That was pretty sweet, although the best part was when Morgan and I went behind the church exploring the old graveyard. There were graves there from the beginning of colonization, and there were many of younger people among these. Lots of whole families were buried there too, only a few years apart. Parents right down to small children. Sad. Mysterious. TORRENTIAL DOWNPOUR. Yes, again, the unreliable Tasmanian weather. Do the skies in the duck pictures look any kind of dark and rainy? Nope. Maybe this one of the church looks slightly cloud-covered, but certainly not dark and imminent. Nevertheless, torrential downpour is what we were caught in and we took a mad dash back to the car. But we were locked out! So we had to go stand under the bridge and wait for Maria and Jenessa to return from inside the church. Haha.

The last stop on our journey was:
Notice the old English spelling of jail. And the footnote. hahah. This jail is supposed to rival Port Arthur, which we're going to visit on our four day fieldtrip. Lemme tell you, this was nothing too exciting. But I was incarcerated. If you look closely you can see how drenched my hair still was from that downpour. Not too attractive, let me tell you. haha.

We rounded off our trip with a stop at a local gourmet pizza shop where I ate the most fabulous pizza I've tasted in a long time. It was owned and operated by the big, tall, burly Swiss-Australian.. try to imagine that accent... haha. But he was sweet and the pizza was amazing. Sitting in that restaurant before we left we managed to witness bright sun, rain, hail, sun, rain, sun, hail, sun all in about twenty minutes. When the sun broke for the last time, we made a run for it to the car. The end!