Jo O'Brien

As you might remember, for my birthday James gave me a trip to Tasmania, which makes me totally and utterly spoiled rotten. (and very happy, tee hee)

So how does one have a Tasmanian Holiday?

Start by getting on the Spirit Of Tasmania. There was this crazy guy doing all the announcements and he kept giggling and then trailing off at the end of each one…. strange.

Have a “Final Destination Moment” on the way from the ship. If you don’t get that, you’re not cool enough.

Prepare for self portraits by testing all the furniture for it’s climbability… result? Low climbability options, proceed with care and a cup of tea.

Visit some cows, lots of cows. Black cows, spotty cows, even cows with flies on their ears.

Learn how to do landscape photography without even looking at what you are doing. James calls this “Landscape photography 101.” I call it silly.

Take embarrassing tourist photos of unwashed hair in front of a vaguely attractive looking landscape from a lookout that takes ages to get to and isn’t worth the effort.

Visit sheep…

Many sheep…

It’s at about this point that I should confess that the highlight of my trip to Tasmania was sheep. I love sheep, and wool, and it was so sheepy and so woolly. ah, love the sheep…. baaaaaaa!

Stay in dodgy accommodation (not that it matters, we were sleepy by this point)

Have many many toilet stops. So James can take many embarrassing photos of said stops.

Eat awesome food and take Hien-style photos of the food while telling James he has to wait until I get a good shot. He was hungry. Sorry hon.

Take photos under fences of grass and pretty trees and stuff that I never take photos of.

Drive up and down nine mile beach until Jo chucks a tantrum and makes James go back to the first look out we saw and then insist it was another one and then realise she is wrong and chucks another tantrum.

Have RedBubble meet ups with the Tasmanian Locals. Of course in Tasmania, five minutes down the road is a ‘long distance’ so they might not consider themselves as local as we did. “Are you local?” (If you get that joke, I love you and you are a huge geek)

Stop several times and stay on the alert for “the tree” for many hours before James can swerve off the road to take a photo with power lines in it.

Find crazy camping grounds where they are obviously killing all their naughty visitors and warning off other naughty people by hanging their victims’ shoes out the front.

Be majorly big tourists and carry heavy cameras around busy markets and buy nice photography books which have nothing to do with Tasmania as souvenirs

What was that? Jo is into sheep and wool? Yes I actually dragged him into the wool centre so that I could touch and feel all the different types of wool and re-educate myself on the production process from sheep to suit. Um….

Say hi to Rambo

James says that this was his ‘careful planning of schedules.’ I say it is technology dependency.

Have an unplanned and surprisingly good last stop to kill time before getting back on the ship. The guy who owned the place was going around offering to take people’s photos which we saw right through- he just wanted to play with people’s cameras.

This has nothing to do with Tasmania… James made me add it