Tasmania

We are back in the Hunter Valley.  It is raining here at the moment….   Well, really, it has been raining for DAYS!.  Our front yard looks like a swamp.  Funny how all the kangaroos come in close to the house when it rains.  Sometimes when we wake up, there are 20 kangaroos in our yard!

 Peter and I have just returned from spending a month on our tree property in Tasmania.  It is called 'Liena', rhyming with Hyena.  We camped....  i.e. cooked over an open fire, although we do have a small van to sleep in at night.  But we have no electricity, no phone, no internet, etc.  (We have to drive about a kilometer down the road to get a phone signal.)

But what can I say...  the wilderness is fantastic.  The property is incredibly beautiful with 3 running streams on it.  I have enclosed a picture of our ‘mountain hut’  When we bought the property, our hut didn’t have windows and doors and the flooring was covered in 2 feet of sheep poo.  Half of the hut was in such bad shape, we pulled it down.  But what we can salvage, we will build a verandah out to the open fire place.

The hut is now cleaned out, and we have bought secondhand windows and doors.  A builder should be putting them in as I write this.  He will also be putting in a new wooden floor and lining the walls.  Hopefully, the next time we visit our tree property, we can sleep in our little hut.  

But we still won’t have electricity or phone.  So I will be cooking over an open fire with my ‘camp oven’.  I made a beef roast one night...  with some of the left over beef, I made 'stroganoff' the next night, and the remainder I made into a wonderfully rich beef stew.  My next adventure is to learn how to make a damper in an open fire.