Heading southwards on the convict trail

We Left launceston and headed south towards Campbell Town, it is a very old town made up of beautiful old sandstone block houses and businesses mainly built by convicts.
I have followed a face book page called Suburban Jubilee "( Also known as Tanya) for a while now and when Tanya saw that we were coming to Tasmania she sent out a very gracious invitation to call in for a  cuppa  and a chat.

And so we did,
What a lovely visit we had, It was lovely to meet them both , I felt like I had known Tanya  forever and we chatted away for ages.
We both are avid preservers and where as I seem to do the more common everyday things, Tanya seems to do the ordinary as well, but also does many specialty things that are amazing.
Tanya and her husband are lovingly restoring their old convict built sandstone home that was once a bakery, with the original bread oven still a feature. I got to go up in her wonderful attic space and dream. I am so  envious of that old home and in awe of what they are doing. I hope that I keep in touch with Tanya as we appeared to have so much in common.
While in Cambell Town we  visited the Red Brick Bridge,

And visited some wonderful wood carved statues in the park. The town has laid a trail of red bricks  right along the street with convicts names engraved into them( hence the convict trail)

A little further along the road we came to Ross, also famous and visited for its beautiful old bridge.

We stopped here and and a picnic lunch by the river, it was a lovely spot.
The next stop was a place called Oatlands, it  had a wonderful wetlands lake  and bird sactuary  and many  tourists were there feeding ducks and black swans.
There is a beautiful old restored flour mill at Oatlands and we had a tour of it and the surrounding buildings, it was a real look back in time.

Oatlands is known for the vast number of  convict build sandstone buildings it has , it is a  relativley small town but boasts over 150  buildings, most as private homes but also many businesses. we drove around  and most of them are in incredible well maintained condition.

The next town along the way was Richmond, Richmond is also a very historic convict town ( many, many Tasmanian  towns were built on convict labour and in all respects appear to be very English in design as well as name.

As we headed down  towards Sorell, the country side changed dramatically in appearance, it became very dry and brown. Some locals had told us that  Tasmania is suffering very dry conditions at the moment, but until this point all had looked lush and green compared to our little farm out west in NSW>

We reached Sorell, only to find there was no motel there, so we moved on  towards Hobart and found the Travel Lodge at the Hobart Airport...We were expecting it to be noisy with planes one side and highway the other, in fact it was the opposite, so lovely that we decided to stay there 3 nights.

It was a lovely day of history today, we enjoyed it all, we are finding that we are getting around Tasmania  fairly easy. We have decided to halve Tasmania  down the middle and concentrate our   travels into the eastern half and return another time to do the west.
The plan for tomorrow is Port Arthur,and we are really looking forward to that.
Take care everyone,
Cheers
Jane.