This doesn’t look right!
‘This doesn’t look right.’
Roadworks. Or bridge works actually. A couple of cars lined up in front of us waiting for the okay to move ahead.
‘This wasn’t signed anywhere. Was it?’ I looked at Ross, then back at the activity in front of us. The temporary bridge looked as though it might be a challenge. It was.
We had a go but there was no way we could get the caravan around the sharp turn from the road onto the bridge without scraping up the side. Sigh!! This meant reversing - 19’6 inches of caravan and a Hilux - back around the acute turn and onto the road, hoping there would be somewhere we could turn the caravan around. I say “we” but I mean Ross! I was a bit nervous about the whole thing I can tell you. To say it was tricky is less than adequate. But … After a couple of goes and having to put the back of the van right into the muddy gutter, almost scraping the back corner, Ross managed to back the van around and into the driveway of a house located right near where all the activity was happening. The only problem was that the driveway was short. Very short and so we could’t reverse far enough in order to turn the van so we could go back the way we came. Meanwhile cars were backing up (who would have thought so many cars would travel the narrow dirt road?), so I jumped out and ran back to them encouraging them to squeeze past us. Meanwhile Ross was trying to figure out what to do. The only other option was to go towards the bridge but take a left onto another dirt road and drive along it until we came to somewhere we could turn around. We had to do something as we were partway across what was turning into a very busy (in Tasmanian terms) road. Another ute stopped so I dashed along to chat with the nice farmer - well he looked like a farmer, and it turned out I was right. He was 😃.
‘You’ll have to turn up that road,’ he waved in the direction of the road we’d decided we would have to take. ‘Follow me. There’s a place up there you could turn a semi trailer ‘round in.’
With that he took off. And so, considering he might have been an angel sent to rescue us, we took off as well. A bit more sedately though. Some way up the ‘road’ we saw a spot that might work and started to turn. Ross noticed the farmer had stopped a little way ahead and was waving out the window of his ute. So he jogged up to see what what he wanted.
‘He says to follow him and he’ll take us to a better place to turn around.’
So we did. Not much further on there was a huge open paddock. The farmer stopped his ute, jumped out, ambled over to open the rusty metal gate and waved us through. Perfect! No need for all that backwards and forwards manoeuvring. Around we went and back out the gate. We thanked our lovely farmer who nodded and waved a ‘think nothing of it’ kind of wave as he closed the gate after us.
So much for our couple of days at the iconic Liffey Falls camp ground. We decided we might as well go back home. Something to be said for camping not too far from home! However, after a phone call to our veteran camper friend, Ian, we decided to go to a farm stay he knew of but hadn’t tried. And it was only 20 minutes from where we were.
Right on the main road in Hagley is Hagley RV Farm Stay. We initially planned to stay one night, but enjoyed it so much we stayed the three nights there. We had an unpowered site for $10/ night. We could have had power for $25/night. All sites have water. There’s a great community area and a huge fire pit and the most amazing thing - the community building has a whole wall of books!! Yes! A whole wall of them. And to top it off, I discovered that friend and colleague, Annette, from nursing days owns the property. Well, that was so good. We caught up on years of not seeing each other.
So, our disappointment at not being able to cross the bridge to get to Liffey Falls quickly turned into thanksgiving for the wonderful few nights at a campsite we probably wouldn’t have known about otherwise.
We’re booked to go back for a few days around Australia Day. Annette has organised lots of fun activities and I’m going to do a reading from ‘Running Home’ 👏🏻👏🏻. You should come if you can.