"Look at the nature!": Tasmania with five kids (Part 1).

OK so this is a bit belated, since we left Tassie over two weeks ago, but I thought I'd give you a quick rundown of our time in Tasmania in case you're interested in visiting yourself one day.  It's in two parts, and feel free to skip it because sometimes people's holiday tales are like, yawn.  But here goes -  someone might read on!

I have to say that our kids were a good age for this holiday.  They sleep well at night, travel without asking for food every five seconds, no nappies/prams/cots are required and it was especially good they are old enough to walk - a lot.  The main point of having a bit of a look around Tasmania is it's natural beauty and that involved quite a lot of bush walks. And driving.  Which was hard for our 13 year old who gets terribly car sick.  I think we would have easily fitted in a few more day trips if she had coped better, but it felt a bit mean after she'd suffered patiently through a couple of long days in the car.

We caught the boat overnight from Melbourne and we were thankful for a fairly flat voyage.  We had heard horror stories about rough crossings, and while we could feel a bit of rockiness during the night it wasn't horrible.  We also took a lot of sea sickness tablets which helped us sleep.

We arrived at Devonport at 6am and had a few hours to kill before we could into our accommodation.  We went to the Beaconsfield mine museum, which if you have some time was a really fantastic museum for kids.  It's only about hour from Devonport.  The museum had a lot of information, interviews and displays related to the Beaconsfield mine disaster in 2006 where two miners were trapped underground for two weeks.
 Plus there was a display of all sorts of other old 'stuff' including some phones, which the kids loved most of all (so retro!).

We then spent five days in a beachside town called St Helen's on the north east coast. While staying there we drove down south to the Freycinet National Park and walked up to the Wineglass Bay lookout.  This was my favourite day of our holiday because it was just beautiful when we got there.  I've even blocked out the complaining on the way up (actually, the kids were pretty good)!