With pictures!

So I do feel bad about not posting, but really I'm just so uninspired most of the time. Not that anyone COMMENTs on it except for my dad in a phone conversation. Life in Tassie is really pretty boring, I can't say that enough. Not much excitement aaaat aall. But better than another semester in the tundra Ithaca ;). Actually though, this week was pretty eventful, so I felt it was my duty to post a little. So what I did, to make it easier to read, was go back and post two other posts as well about our adventures at the Cadbury chocolate factory and the day we rented a car. So go back two posts and start there. Now, for our four day fieldtrip:

Monday. We wake up bright and early and excited, only for poor Nessie to call home and find out her kitty died because it had stopped eating. So sad, and what and awful way to start out the four days away from "home." Say a prayer for Lily Fisk, I hear you were a great cat.
But the bus was nice, not like the ones we were forced to travel in at Perth, lol. We went to the Tasman National Park Lookout.........

You know what, we did sooo many things on this fieldtrip that I really don't think I can go through it all. I'll just upload the pictures to webshots soon (I know I'm behind on that too, but hey. With crappy internet like me, you'd be behind too) and you can go through that. Because seriously, we just did so ridiculously many things that it would take pages and hours to write about it all. In short: lots of blowholes, a few national parks, a bunch of hiking, visiting this hippie guy Peter and his awesome house and surrounding land, a lecture by the head of a national park, Port Arthur, a ghost tour of Port Arthur, Remarkable Cave, Coles bay, pine tree plucking, haunted field centers, a cute hostel, and Wineglass bay and the accompanying three hour hike. Look how much I just had to type and that's simply the names of places!! lolol. But I promise to get those pictures up soon.. in the meantime, enjoy the previous two posts and that should keep you satiated for a while. heheheh. But I will leave you with one awesome picture of me.

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!

Cadbury!

So Friday Maria, Morgan, Kendall and I went on a cruise/tour of the Cadbury factory. We learned about the many steps of making chocolate in general, from fruit-like thing to cocoa butter to actual chocolate (with other steps in between). Not much really to talk about, but here's our photo narrative of the trip:

1) I've got a golden ticket!!


2) On the boat there was a joke made by the older captain reminding us that in the factory you have to wear closed-toed shoes and what you had to remove all jewelry, hats, or anything else that moved that wasn't part of your body, including dentures. This rendered a laugh from the elderly population, which was everyone else except us.


3) Directly upon entering the factory, you are immediately fed chocolate. Here's me eating my chocolate.

4) We weren't allowed to take pictures in the factory itself, but here's a taste of what we looked like walking around in it, hair nets and all, with even more chocolate that we were given out of a treasure chest.










5) The boat ride home, with our chocolate postcards!

6) Finally, the end scene in this photo narrative.. Morgan with her "chocolate hangover." Hahahaha

It's over!!