A Day At The Bay
We really loved Bicheno and especially loved our Airbnb accommodation with the sea view. It was hard to leave! We had a wander around town with a mandatory browse in both the surf shops, the community garden and the Bich (see I’m almost a local now) bottle shop where we purchased some local Tassie beer & wine. Eventually it was time to ditch the Bich (say that 3 times fast) and we hit the road to head north; Molly in the driver’s seat and Toby on the tunes. We are all taking turns at picking the music, which is fun. We started the trip with a Spotify blend, consisting of songs all 6 of us might like. It was good but only had 29 songs on it and every time we got back in the car, we heard the same songs over and over.
So, as we motored along to Toby’s soundtrack of soul and funk today, we were headed to the Apsley National Park, and more specifically, the Apsley Waterhole. The way in was very rural and remote, with a blistering speed limit of 5km per hour along a narrow dirt road, over little wooden bridges and past paddocks with hay bales and eerily stationary sheep. A few days ago I’d asked if the sheep on the side of the road were real but Tobes took it one step further today, enquiring as to whether the sheep were dead.
Some of the land was private property and Sam instructed us to keep it down, misreading the signs as “NO SHOUTING!” instead of “NO SHOOTING!”, which it actually was. We did our best to keep it to a whisper and left all our weapons behind. Those sheep could rest easy (even though as we’ve established, they were already resting so ‘easy’ they looked to be dead.)
The Apsley Waterhole track, which announced itself as one of Tasmania’s 60 most beautiful short walks, was very pretty and so quiet, all you could hear was birdsong and rushing water (and obviously no baa-ing).
Ross Googled “local wineries”, thinking we might pop into a couple along the way today. The first entry that turned up was the Bicheno BWS bottle-o. Not quite what we had in mind. We settled instead on the Iron House Brewery. Set right on the rugged coast with ocean views, it was a great spot. We sampled some of their cool ales, grabbed a snack and enjoyed the atmosphere.
We sped past the adorably named town of Woolly Butt and had a quick drive to its neighbouring village, Falmouth where apparently everyone swears. As we turned off the highway we noticed the big sign pointing to Falmouth said “No Through Road”, in essence declaring the whole town as a dead end.
Five members of the Jones Family have our phones with Vodafone, while Sam has his plan with Optus. We have sadly discovered that Vodafone and Tasmania don’t make a good team and we have all been on ‘SOS’ for pretty much the entire time we’ve been here. We’ve learnt the hard way, what all the locals concur: “Vodafone here is rubbish”. Sam, on the other hand, has had his 4G, and even on occasion, 5G, firing on all cylinders, chastising us for not responding to his suggestions on our group chat or answering his messages. He’s the HotSpot King. If any of us annoy him, he can just turn off his hot spot.
Our beds for tonight are in a little apartment in St Helen’s, in the Bay Of Fires and after dropping our bags and woofing down some sangas we were keen to hightail it to the beach for a look at the famous orange boulders.
Binnalong Bay was absolutely stunning! We found a spot out of the wind, amongst those signature Bay of Fires rocks, where we swam in the crystal clear surf and reclined on the powdery white sand.
The sun is setting around 9pm here and a recurring theme in our family is to ask : “is it that late already?” Firmly entrenched in our perfect beach spot until well after 6pm, it was still so bright and sunny we all thought it was mid-afternoon.
With a quick tour of some of the other spectacular beaches in the quirkily-named council area, Break O’Day, Sam sent his drone out to explore and the footage is truly magical.
Again, all the restaurants and pubs in this vicinity close at the ridiculously early hour of 8pm, so it was a quick lick and a flick, as my mother-in-law would say, to brush the sand off and make ourselves look vaguely presentable for our evening meal. Sam found us a fantastic place for dinner - the Social - with scrumptious food and an interior decked out in a plethora of relics from a bygone era; treasures from the 70s, making Ross and I feel like we were back in our childhood lounge rooms. Molly’s passion for furniture - especially chairs - from the decade where brown and orange reigned supreme - was fully satisfied as she sampled and sat herself snugly in every single chair in this vinyl-clad Mecca.
We will all sleep well tonight…it’s Binnalong day.
