Author: Mike P

Spirit of Tasmania – Day 149

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Spirit Tasmania Boat Docked with Cars

The journey between the two major tourist centres of Devonport and Geelong merits an entire post! Instead of flying back to mainland Australia, the family opted for a passenger ferry called the Spirit of Tasmania (we love the name). The children had been looking forward to this leg for over six months. This would be their first overnight ferry and they could not wrap their heads around sleeping on a boat. Paige made us reserve an outside cabin, meaning bunk beds AND a window. We were tired of answering the kids’ questions, so we showed them some YouTube clips about the journey.

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St. Helens – Days 147& 148

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Landscape on sunny day at Bay of Fires

Our next destination in Tasmania was St. Helens which would be our base for exploring the surrounding Bay of Fires. We checked out of our Airbnb, took an uber to the local library and did some schoolwork until our rental car was available next door. We got some stares from the librarian as we dumped all our gear in the kids’ section. At noon we picked up the vehicle and drove across the bridge exiting Hobart but got mixed up with a roundabout on the other side and ended up back in Hobart! Apparently, we didn’t want to leave. We sorted out our directions, crossed the bridge again and were actually on our way.

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Birthday adventures in Hobart – Days 139-146

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Children chasing each other on secluded beach

At Cradle Mountain, the weather cleared the morning of our departure! Paigey and I wanted to return and hike the trails we avoided because of the rain. Isabella and Julie begged to go see some more wombats. Katie just wanted to take more blurry pictures. Instead, we opted to start early on our long drive to the Tasmanian capital. Hobart would be our home base for the next 8 days, allowing us: to get schooling back on track, do some laundry and bake a dinosaur cake! The adults were ecstatic at having an actual HOUSE for a week while the kids were thrilled with their own room. The house also had a mammoth BBQ and a full kitchen which was needed for baking.

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Cradle Mountain – Rain, Joeys & Wombats – Day 138 : Guest Post by Katie Policicchio

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Wombat eating grass at picnic site

This is a guest post from my sister Katie who is joining us in Tasmania!

G’day from the Land Down Under! 

Not wanting to eat leftover taco meat for breakfast, Paige and I headed out early Sunday morning to the Penguin Country Bakehouse. To our delight, the small town bakery had a large selection of goodies and coffees, and was a nice break from the cold rain. To our dismay, when we returned to our apartment, we realized that we had locked ourselves out. We attempted to adopt the Aussie “no worries” attitude but after 40 minutes (that turned our hot coffees into iced versions) we became frazzled. While Mike was homeschooling, Paige and I would take turns running to the front of the apartment, jumping on the street, waving our arms and yelling. I’m pretty sure everyone except Mike and the kids saw us.  

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No Penguins in Penguin – Day 137

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Man looking for penguins on beach with signpost

Next on the agenda was a ten-day stint on the island of Tasmania. The team was now five as my sister joined us for a few days on the island (she had flown in from Canada to visit us). I had no preconceptions about Tasmania as Paigey had planned this entire leg on her own. I knew there would be some driving (which I didn’t miss in the least) but I also anticipated good food, scenery and wildlife. And boy, were there some wildlife memories to be had.

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Halloween in Bogota – Days 121-125

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Children sitting in the Bogota sign

We arrived in Bogota recognizing that the Colombian leg of our trip was ending.  Our last 5 days consisted of doing some slow living (i.e. laundry), watching the Raptors and getting schoolwork done.  We did no research on Bogota ahead of time and felt like we had no real objectives to cross off. When it was all said and done, we watched some Raptors, we had our first doctor’s visit and the kids got to experience Halloween, “Bogota-style“.

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Medellin – Bring on the Tours – Days 113-118

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Two children riding the cable cars in Medellin

We arrived in Medellin (pronounced Medejin as Julie keeps correcting us) with our sunburnt bodies. We settled in the area of Laureles, as Paigey decided that was the place to stay. She found a “hipster-ish” Airbnb that worked for us perfectly (it had laundry which we desperately needed). Our goal was to spend a full week settled in one place doing some slow living and some schoolwork. We filled all the drawers with our freshly laundered clothes. We filled the fridge with actual groceries (yep, we bought butter) and not just snacks. We even signed up for an NBA league pass to watch Raptors’ basketball in Colombia. We made ourselves a comfortable home base.

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Tayrona National Park (but not really) – Days 110-112

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Family buying bananas on side of the road in jungle area

If you’ve had 4 days of warm, wet weather, why not go someplace with warmer and wetter weather?! We had a great intro to Colombia with our stay in Cartagena but since we had booked things ahead of time, we were on the move! Our destination was a mini-resort hotel just outside of Tayrona National Park at the base of the Sierra Nevada mountains. It was our first internal transit day and we were anxious to see if we still had those backpacker skills from years ago.

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The big tourist destinations of Madison & Indianapolis – Day 82-84

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Family at a mock sports broadcasting studio

We got two more pictures of state capitol buildings by stopping in Madison and Indianapolis. One might ask, why go to Madison at all? The answer for us was logistics. We simply wanted to break a ten-hour drive into two five-hour legs. And on the map, Madison is about the midway point between Minneapolis and Indianapolis. Our real goal was getting to Indianapolis because Paigey had read about a children’s museum there and thought it could be a good place for homeschooling. If you have kids and they aren’t in school, this is the spot for you and is completely worthy of a road trip. We went during a weekday in September and essentially had the museum to ourselves (it was too early in the school year for field trips). I’m not exaggerating, at some of the live demonstrations, our kids were the only 2 people to show up so they got to learn from the scientists one on one. This day, we didn’t even have to pretend to be good teachers.

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Minneapolis and the Golden Gophers- Days 78-81

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Two kids standing in front of inflatable mascot at a football game

It was an early departure from Grasslands National Park as we anticipated an eight-hour day of driving. We had not really planned on it but we were changing our route and heading back to Toronto through the northern states. Fortunately, we had picked up Julie’s passport the day before which allowed us to take this “southerly” route and avoid a repeat of the drive between Winnipeg and Nipigon. Julie was pumped as she was getting a new country and Isabella was excited as she figured out Olive Gardens are more plentiful in the US than in Canada.

So there we were at 8:30 in the morning somewhere on the Saskatchewan / US border (Morgan to be exact) waiting for US border control to open up the border. Talk about ignorance on my part! I just assumed the border was open all hours of the day (as I did not listen to Paige who said it might be closed). But we had to wait an hour for the gate to be opened up and for us to be allowed through.

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