Saturday

What do you do if you should find yourself in Hobart on a Saturday morning? Well, of course you go to the Salamanca Market.

I have been once before but it was over twenty years ago.  It's grown quite a lot since then!  There were hundreds of stalls and lots of people wandering around.  It was an excellent way of spending an hour or so on a Saturday morning - and perhaps one or two dollars as well :-)

Lindsey entering the Salamanca Market

We went for a wander around the Hobart City Centre.  It's a pretty little city.  Apart from its size, it reminds me a bit of Edinburgh.

It has a beautiful bridge which connects the two sides of the city in an easy drive. We've been over it several times. It got knocked down by a rogue ship in the 1970s.  This was a serious inconvenience to the people who lived on one side of the harbour but who worked in the city centre!

You would think that we might have thought to check the ferry time to Maria Island before we embarked on the day's activities.  But we didn't.  We just hopped in the car when we had finished the things we wanted to do in the morning and took ourselves off on the rather beautiful drive to Orford and Triabunna - only to find that we had missed the lunchtime ferry by about 20 minutes.  The next ferry wasn't until mid-afternoon and would only give you about half an hour on the island before the last ferry came back.  There's no late afternoon ferry in the off season.  So we abandoned the idea of Maria Island and went here for lunch instead, attracted by the chalk board out the front which advised us that the combination of a wood fire and shepherd's pie was not to to be missed

And it was a mighty fine shepherd's pie indeed. Country cooking at its best!

We liked Triabunna.  It's a small settlement, but it has cafes, a small supermarket, a gift shop, a butcher, a ferry port and marina, a pub and various other things.  You could almost live there even without a car to take you to Sorrel or Swansea.  I'm not so sure you could live in Orford without a car. It has many, many more houses but seems to have far fewer facilities. It does have a nice beach, though.

However, we aren't planning to move to either of these places and made our way back to Hobart, via the veg shop we were in on Friday, and an oyster shop where Lindsey bought oysters and prawns as an entree for our dinner.  We followed them with fish poached in lemon and olive oil, roast potatoes and lots of lovely veg