Anyone who has met me knows I’m not that competitive in nature, and I have applied this non-competitive approach to our fuel economy on each trip. On our first trip of any distance we managed 15.7 litres per 100km. There have been moments when this increased (headwinds and mountain ranges generally don’t help and neither do all the extra bits and pieces we have acquired along the way) but of late I have made some tweaks to the set-up and on the last trip (trips need to be a minimum of 200km to qualify) “we” managed to get it down to 13.7 litres per 100km. This is much less than our CX7 used to use, and it wasn’t towing a 3 tonne van behind it! Monitoring our economy isn’t just a casual calculation done every now and again or at the end of each trip, I have the screen in question constantly on the dashboard of the Jeep and I am aware of it from the moment we start each trip until we finish. When we are going well I provide Hayley with updates as to our progress (she doesn’t seem to share quite the same level of excitement or passion for some reason) and she is also aware of any negative impacts on our economy as I curse under my breath or sigh loudly (roadwork’s/ not being able to use the momentum from coming down a hill due to a slow driver or sharp corner / traffic etc). So the last trip has set a new standard in terms of fuel economy, one that I will be trying to maintain or improve upon into the future. PS – despite the title I have not used cruise control for towing the van as yet, I just don’t trust the inbuilt systems to have that same competitive streak necessary to break or maintain records…

Fuel economy is a nice segway for our visit to Melbourne – back into a city with stop start driving does nothing for the figures and neither does having the GPS navigation set (by that magic random setting generator most computers seem to have) to “no-tollways” which had us taking the van down and around some incredibly tight back streets, where the other drivers were obviously not accustom to seeing caravans (at least I think that’s what they were pointing at with their middle fingers!)… With only one available caravan site in Melbourne our choices were pretty limited, but we are happy enough basing ourselves in one location and then travelling around the area by car – it’s one of the reasons we went with the caravan set-up in the first place!

We will visit Melbourne again on the flipside of our trip to Tasmania, this time we just wanted to catch up with a few friends, prepare for our trip to the Apple Isle and have a relaxed look around town. I had arranged for the car to get its 10k service (no photos of that I’m afraid despite it being the first milestone for “Kenny”) and we had arranged for Denver’s schoolwork to go to cousin Paige who lives in Melbourne, so there were a few “travelling chores” that needed to be attended to as well as just having a good time! The kids adore Paige and even though Denver realised that she was the bearer of dreaded schoolwork the hesitation only lasted a minute before the kids were clamouring to sit next to her at lunch and tell her all about the stories so far…

Lunch and fun with Cousin Paige!

The weekend brought a trip out to the Yarra Valley and a lovely lunch in Healsville at the Innocent Bystander restaurant and winery with some friends inviting us for some wonderful food and beautiful local wines.

Healsville Heaven!

We followed it up with a glorious ice-cream at the newly opened “Gelaperia” which serves fantastic traditional Italian ice-cream and gelato and has a very cool Piaggio flatbed car that doubles as an eating counter. The kids then demolished a huge number of Lindsay’s passionfruit from his garden at home before declaring themselves full and ready for bed!

Piaggio table – the perfect ending to a wonderful meal!

During the rest of the week, leading up to our trip on the Spirit of Tasmania, I managed to catch up with some work colleagues (who had a little thank you for me as our division had just achieved budget for the year) and an old friend of mine from university days, Lisa who cooked us a wonderful dinner and introduced the kids to the concept of a home theatre room (watching movies or even ABC2 may never be the same again!). Lisa and I go way back to my first year of Uni at Lismore, where fate brought us together to protect each other against the weirdness that was our landlords family – somehow we managed to keep each other sane enough to escape the following year but it was one of those times that you can look back on and laugh about, despite it not seeming overly funny at the time!

St Kilda swing, followed by (you guessed it!) and ice-cream

As part of our travelling pact Hayley and I had agreed that it may be necessary, from time to time, for us to spend a night away from the van in a hotel or somewhere different to break things up a bit. In Melbourne we agreed that Hayley would grab a last minute hotel deal to give her a sanity break and allow her to catch up with Sam, one of her old friends from her time in the UK. After grabbing a coffee (or hot chocolate as the kids and I have not converted yet!) at Mario’s café (who I used to work with but is now following his dream and running a successful Italian café in the heart of the city) we dropped Hayley outside the hotel for her adventure. The kids and I then headed to Scienceworks to experience the wonderful hands on learning that this sort of interactive environment provides. Without the careful planning of Mum involved I then agreed that we should be able to head back to the caravan, jump on a bus to the city, do the city circle tour on a tram, grab some dinner and then do the reverse route home. In the end that’s exactly what we did and at the same time I managed to prepare the kids to stay up later than normal for our planned trip to the Queen Vic Night Markets (that’s “spin” for I kept them up way too late travelling around the city!).

In the afternoon before the night markets Denver’s first wobbly tooth finally decided it would come out. Although it gave him one less thing to play with (kids love grossing you out by wobbling their wobbly teeth!) it was pretty incredible, firstly because it came out while he was swimming in the pool at the caravan park (had he not realised it quickly and secured it there is little doubt that looking for it would have become the aqua version of a needle in a haystack) and secondly because it is a pretty symbolic moment of growing up – not quite boy becomes man, but at the very least it’s the start of the process (ask your wife if you don’t understand!).

No more wiggling for this one! The first tooth, lost while swimming

The night markets are a great sensory experience and the kids selected a wide range of foods from a number of different cultures as a kind of tapas style smorgasbord from which they picked out their favourite bits and left the rest for us. Followed up by some strudel and chocolate covered strawberries and I’m sure the kids were wondering why we didn’t do this every night! Sitting, sharing the strudel (nobody was getting the strawberries), we met Stephan and his wife who invited us to Germany to sample the real thing, before heading off to find somewhere to sleep in their campervan for the night. I’m not sure they appreciated the vast distances of Australia as they only had a week left in Australia and were planning on travelling through VIC/NSW countryside and spending some time in different parts of Sydney. The kids were fascinated by their accents and enjoyed giving them some advice on what they should see on the way, adding even more into their already quite ambitious plans!

Queen Vic Night Markets – great food and great advice!

Before we knew it we had the van packed and were headed to the ports of Melbourne to board the Spirit of Tasmania for our overnight sailing! During the day we had eaten all of the “banned” foods that we had on board (an eclectic mix to be sure) and as we approached the docks the Jeep was filled with excitement from three quarters of its occupants, nerves from the remaining occupant (who has a tendency to get a little sea-sick) but great anticipation from all about the adventure ahead. After being pulled up for being longer than our booking length (to be fair I had estimated the length before we even had possession of the caravan!) and putting the bikes inside the van to minimise the financial impact, we lined up next to a group of very impressive Harley’s and got chatting to those around us. A good discussion about travelling around America as rider and pillion, a few posed photos for the kids and a commitment from Hayley that when we sold the van I could use the money to buy a Harley (there, it’s in writing so it must be true!) and it was boarding time…

In the line for the Spirit of Tasmania

Harley Heaven – a pose and a promise of things to come!

We were virtually the last on, but I could tell as we drove through the ship and parked at the front of our row that we would be pretty much first in line to get off. If I was given the choice I would have gone for the other way round (first on and virtually last off) given that our version involved late nights (April was too tired to even eat and fell asleep in my arms after a quick look around) as well as early mornings (so that we weren’t the numpties getting paged at 6am for blocking the entire exitway of the ship).

Its like entering Moby Dick!

Our cabin, looks compact, but we are used to that!

The warning about big swells sounded slightly ominous as we settled in for the night but hopefully when we woke up we would be in Tassie!