Lead up to Tassie.

Well we had a very eventful time leading up to getting on the Spirit of Tasmania.

We left the caravan at the Warrandyte caravan park while we stayed with Mike and barb’s place whilst in Melbourne. When we dropped off the van we noted that the park was quite tight for caravan space, being mainly cabins. There was also a creek running just behind our van but it was about 4-5 metres below where the van was parked so it didn’t appear to be a problem. However, what we didn’t count on was that Melbourne was going to get a year’s  rainfall on Friday night. We were at the races at Mooney Valley on Friday night and when they cancelled the races with 2 races to go the alarm bells began to ring. Didn’t get much sleep that night, listening to the rain continue to fall and was very keen to get to the park to get the van.

Mike and I went at around 9.30am on Saturday morning and I was dismayed to see that at the entrance to the park the creek had gone over it’s bank and had flooded the entrance to the park, where someone had obviously driven through the boom gate which was snapped off. After driving through about 2 feet of water through the park we found that the van was still on dry ground although there was water rushing through the park from the other side towards the creek which was almost to the top of the bank behind the van. After the fastest ever hook up, didn’t have time to connect the power or Hayman Reese we started to wind between the cabins towards the exit only to be confronted with wall to wall water of indeterminable depth. The manager of the park tried to convince us to leave the van but that was never going to happen so we got him to walk in front of us through the water as a guide to the depth, which was now over knee deep. Eventually we were able to get out just in the nick of time. I reckon that 30 minutes later we may have lost the van and wouldn’t that have put a dampener (no pun intended) on our trip.

After parking on the verge in front of Mike & Barb’s place on Saturday night we got to Port Melbourne to board the Spirit of Tasmania without ant drama and the whole loading procedure was very professionally handled although Bon was a bit anxious about leaving the girls in the van for 10 hours. As it happened the crossing was pretty rough but the girls showed no effects that it distressed them as there wasn’t even a wee in the van when we arrived in Devonport.

Next. The apple isle.