Cycling

Finally a chance to do lots of riding. Already posted about the ride up to the ski area (BTW, looking from a distance - looks like snow down beyond treeline up there today.) 2 days of riding along the Northwest coast - faces onto the Bass Strait which separates Tas from the Big Island - 200 km wide. Pretty cold, but little wind and no big waves. Very pretty riding. 2 towns of about 20,000 each. Devenport is the terminal from the Ferry from the mainland - lots of trucks on board, and tourists. Some bring the cars over (expensive). Others travel as foot passengers, and rent a car when they get to Tassie. About 600 feet and the trip takes 11 hours.

The other port is Burnie and is where all the container traffic comes in.

Rode up onto a flat topped bluff on the edge of the ocean - turns out it's an old basalt core from a lava vent (think of the basic geology of Tassie as a lot of sedimentary limestone layers, with younger lava that pushed up through the sediments and laid down layers of igneous dolorite on top of the limestone. Lots of exposures of the dolorite, and limited exposures of the limestone. This was an area with lots of limestone and this one basaltic core pushing through it. The core was about 2 km in diameter and stuck up about 200 meters.) The top was apparently very fertile, and rolling farmland and entirely occupied by tulip fields - the largest patch of tulips in the southern hemisphere. Only one small field of purple tulips were still in bloom, but the pictures of spring when they are all in multicolored bloom look pretty spectacular.

Along the coast was a lot of sedimentary rock with large glacial erratics from hundreds of kilometers away, dumped here in the last ice age. Pretty neat.

Today rode near Lonnie and found a hill that was over 20% for 400 meters. That's a really long way to be that steep - had to do a few zig zags and stopped in a driveway for a break before finishing it off. Felt like a wimp, but I was afraid that if I blew up and couldn't turn the crank one more time, I'd never get unclipped and could roll backwards to the bottom of the hill - or something. It was really pretty insane. The rest of the ride was rolling open farmland.