Art is not something I particularly dig to be honest. I hardly ever visit art galleries and do find quite a lot of paintings over-rated, and some forms of art totally irrelevant and actually stupid, rather than clever. Which is why Sheffield came as a particular surprise. Growing up in Northern Ireland you really…
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These three places are all great, but sometimes it’s nice to condense things a bit, given my over-elaborate posts on here from time to time. So here they are on one post. Basically they are places near the Tamar River and north of Launceston in Tasmania. I went on a mini road trip to…
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Zeehan formed part of my western wilderness road trip while living in Tasmania. I was on the way to Zeehan when I had my petrol worry, almost ran out, but luckily made it to Tullah, a small village on the West Coast of Tasmania. Its all remote and wilderness out that way. Zeehan is another…
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Once you’ve worked in “weeding” in your life, I would have to say that most other jobs seem easy. I didn’t plan to do weeding, but while employed by Work Direct (A harvest and labouring work agency in Devonport, Tasmania) I told them I would do any job, and this often meant getting phone calls…
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I had never heard of the Carlyle Hotel, or even the district of Moonah, some kind of northern suburb of Hobart, I believe. It was time to hold the closest ever meeting to the South Pole for any Northern Ireland Supporters Club in history. And thanks to Hobart based, Andy Power, the venue was sorted,…
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I write this 3 months after my trip to Wineglass Bay… …Tasmania is packed with National Parks. There are 17 in all on this island. One of the most visited and famous ones is Freycinet National Park, situated on the east coast of Tasmania. It was hardly on my list of things to do…
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So from our peak at Rinadeena, it was time to head downhill from the mines and into an area, barely a village named Dubbil Barril, note the strange spelling as opposed to Double Barrel. The rainforest route on the way down was totally amazing, we past gorges. We must have gone…
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This isn’t actually a post about former Manchester United and Scotland star Gordon Strachan. Though you really could have fooled me there. When I heard that the Gordon River flowed through a town called Strahan, I almost expected an action replay of the 1986 World Cup, where Scotland went 1-0 up on West Germany before…
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WEST COAST WILDERNESS RAILWAY PART FOUR – LUNCH AT RINADEENA (RAINDROP) So I left behind the remote mining village of Lynchford, for this lifetime at least. This is where the train tracks got steeper and became a railway incline, as part of the famous “rack and pinion” system. I had already been on the…
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It’s sounds a bit silly if I say “I’ve always been interested in railways”, because I say that about so many things. But there is something inspiring about being onboard a train. There’s history, character, atmosphere, geography, music involved in train journeys. And Michael Palin has a series called “The World’s Great Train Journeys.” I…
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