You can’t get there from here
7 Apr
One of my favorite New England yarns from Doug is a story about a tourist who stops at a little town in Maine to ask for driving directions. He sees an old Mainer sitting outside a coffee shop and asks, “Can you tell me how to get to Bangor?”
The Mainer looks at him, and slowly drawls out, “You can’t get there from here.”
Puzzled, the tourist asks, “Well, where does this road go?”
“Don’t go nowhere,” the Mainer answers. “Stays right here.”
I wish you could hear Doug tell it in his New England accent. It kills me every time.
During the last part of the trip, I felt a lot like that tourist in Maine. The roads in Tasmania didn’t seem to go anywhere but there.
Before we left on our trip, I studied up on Tasmania, visiting travel websites and keeping a hefty Fodor’s guide by my besides at night. Fodor was pretty good except in one regard. They offered this piece of advice, “Most places within Tasmania are within easy driving distance.” And you would think so, given that Tasmania is about the size of West Virginia and also because I’m from Montana, I have a bit of an ego about driving long distances to get to good spots.
What the guidebook didn’t say is that the roads are all narrow, mostly curvy, and it’s not at all advisable to drive at night because the woods spit nocturnal wildlife onto the road every five minutes.
Oh, and then there is the left side of the road thing. Doug did an admirable job of driving, and only forgot a couple times (when we were on very rural roads) that he should be driving on the left, not the right. We probably had the cleanest windshield in Tasmania though because every time he went to turn on the blinker (usually on the left) he hit the windshield wiper instead.
Doug in the driver's seat on the right
So, when I planned the trip to Tasmania I had one of those traveler dilemmas — stay in one place and get to know it really well (i.e. a backpacking trip) or try to see as much as possible because you may never come back. I opted for the latter and booked a couple of nights on the West Coast, which required a drive from the East Coast and Freycinet National Park. No problem, I thought. We can do 4-5 hours in the car. If we get up early we can also hike at Lake St. Clair National Park. No problem.
I know this metaphor may not work for those you not from Montana, but what we did in one day was equivalent to driving 8 hours from Bozeman to Calgary, Alberta with a five hour hike in Glacier in the middle.
To try to speed things up, we took shortcuts across the state, asking people only an hour’s drive from the shortcut road if it was an okay road and finding that some people in Tasmania haven’t left their county in their entire lifetime.
The road less traveled
It was a long gravel road, which was marked mostly by huge logging trucks going way too fast and a forest fire that seemed awfully close to the road when we drove by. Fortunately, it led us to the beautiful Lake St. Clair National Park where we hiked through rainforest up to view two glacial lakes.
Lake St. Clair National Park
At Forgotten Lake
But that wasn’t nearly as bad as the highway to the west coast after we finished our hike. Beautiful views of glacier valleys and mountain cliffs were not seen by me, because I was trying not to gag from the motion sickness caused by hairpin turns that went on endlessly.
We stopped in Queenstown (Tasmania’s version of Butte – it has open-pit copper mining and everything) to grab some meat pies (I abstained do to the nausea) and then crept along for 40 km (it took us an hour and a half) because of all the darting wildlife in the road (rabbits, possums, and wallabies).
We arrived in the coastal village of Strahan at our B&B, drop off the baggage, and leave Hannah to sleep while we search for a “bottleshop” to buy a few bottles of beer to share back at the hotel.
Turns out the only place to buy beer in Strahan at 11 p.m. is at the bar so we turn up there to buy a six pack. Doug approaches to buy the said beer and a middle-aged man with an extremely red face and slurred speech asks us where we are from. In towns of 750, it’s easy to pick out newcomers, even if we weren’t from the country.
We’re having as decent a conversation as you can with a drunk man from Tasmania who is called a “slag” by his girlfriend (apparently that means redneck) until he decides to reach over to unzip my hooded sweatshirt (which didn’t get him very far since I had a t-shirt on underneath).
Doug’s reaction was to sort of gently push him back and say, “Hey now, she doesn’t like to be fussed with.”
Which is hilarious in and of itself (I now tell him all the time that I don’t like to be fussed with) but I didn’t really help matters because in trying to diffuse any possible tension I said, “Oh, it’s ok.” Very lame.
Anyway, we left without any altercation and the whole incident was fairly minor, but it’s true, I don’t like to be fussed with.
did Doug mention that back home in Montana we shoot people for less than that -
No, all he could come up with was “she doesn’t like to be fussed with. Classic!” Janelle
I’m laughing more about your response! “Oh. It’s ok.” Why is that what we women always say?? Reminds me of the Ellen DeGeneres bit where she accidentally walks in on someone in a public restroom stall and the occupier says, “It’s ok.” Ellen jokes that she then continued into the stall and invited others in as well, “She says it’s ok, come on in everyone!”
That’s so funny! It truly was an involuntary response, and I was a little ashamed to even to write truthfully about it. Doug gave me this look like, “What are you talking about?” at the time. I think women are so trained to be passive it’s like the first thing that comes out during stress, which is a scary thing, if you think about it.