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LOCATION: SPIRIT OF TASMANIA, PORT PHILLIP BAY
EN ROUTE FROM MELBOURNE, VICTORIA TO DEVONPORT, TASMANIA
Recently I celebrated one of those milestone special birthdays… one that ends with a zero. Happy birthday to me, hurrah! To celebrate the occasion, I took my family on a surprise journey across Bass Strait to Tasmania, starting with an unexpected boarding onto the Spirit of Tasmania. It was a trip I had planned for months and was looking forward to incredibly, as I returned to the traditional lands of my Aboriginal ancestors, the Bay of Fires in the north east corner of Tasmania.
Part of the fun for me was the surprise factor as I had tricked my boys into thinking we were going elsewhere, knowing that they’ve wanted to go on the boat to Tasmania for, in their words, “forever.”
In a household full of boys, I always make sure my birthday involves my favourite colour, pink. In previous years we’ve visited a farm that grows my most favourite flowers of them all, the stunning peony rose, on their open weekend when they would let me loose in the field to cut my own bouquet. This year, for the zero, I decided to go a bit further afield and had told me boys that we were off to Mildura so that we could visit the pink lake that’s nestled between there and Ouyen. You can imagine their surprise when we turned up at Station Pier to board a boat headed in the opposite direction!!
For the next few days, I’m going to take you along with me on my journey back to my traditional homeland. It’s fitting to start where the journey begins, aboard the Spirit of Tasmania bound for Devonport, Tasmania as we sail into the dark of night.
I hope you enjoy the journey with us! For now, I’ll close with a quote by Charles R. Swindoll that I adore…
Each day of our lives we make deposits in the memory banks of our children.
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