The Grand Tour, Part III

The third day involved a transfer to a different tour company and a drive up to Cradle Mountain. Cradle Mountain is a much scrubbier, rougher place than the rest of Tasmania, or at least the rest of the areas that we had seen. It’s fairly similar in nature to the Rocky Mountains around the Jasper area, although Cradle Mountain is covered in these weird patchy clumps of grass called "Button Grass".



Cradle Mountain is also covered in wombats. We probably saw over a dozen wombats foraging around, much to the delight of one of the families on our tour group. They were obsessed with wombats, and were inevitably the first ones to see one waddling around. During the tour, the family encountered a wombat on a walking path, and as the daughter was standing very still, taking a video, it waddled up to her and gave her leg a bit of a taste. The family was ecstatic at this – the wombat didn’t bite, per say, as it didn’t puncture jeans or skin and just left her with a bit of a bruise. They got it on video and couldn’t stop talking about the wombat love bite. They decided that their daughter would become "wombie girl", and when the tour guide took them to the ranger station to have the bite looked at, the rangers had a good laugh at the incident.

On our way back to Launceston, the bus driver suggested we go past a farm cheese factory and have a look at their farm gate store. There would be many samples to try, and for those who don’t like cheese, there would be many varieties of honey to taste. So we stopped at the Ashgrove Cheese farm and stepped off the bus and into a sticky, cheesy heaven. As the farm operates their own dairy and honey production, everything was as fresh as you could possibly hope for.

There were about ten varieties of cheese produced on that farm, eight varieties of honey, homemade ice cream, and oodles of wines and meads. Glen and I bought two bottles of braggot (mead ale) to try. In addition to the mead, we picked up two different kinds of cheese and a bottle of strawberry wine. It was a dangerous, dangerous place to be in, and now I shall regale you with photos in order to make you, dear reader, wildly jealous. I give you:




The cheese wall!





The honey stand!





The wine wall!

Personally, I think we held off reasonably well, only coming away with two small bottles of mead, one small bottle of strawberry wine, and two kinds of cheese. That would be the sort of place to visit if you were looking to put together the best Christmas stocking ever, because they had sample size variety packs of everything and the prices were extremely reasonable. Like I said: it was a dangerous, if delicious, place to visit.

Ah, and for the curious among you, the cheeses we bought were both Lancashire, regular and smoked.