February.

"The Spirit of the Sea" in Devonport. This is a hilarious statue at the mouth of the Mersey River in Devonport. It is a nude statue of Poseidon I think, or maybe Neptune. Anyways, it cost taxpayers something like $180,000 and it ended up a bit weirdly proportioned and sort of funny looking.

Well it has been ages since I have posted anything. Things just sort of got away from me and the longer I waited, the more overwhelming it seemed to try and put something together. It has been about month since I have written anything and quite a bit has happened in that time. 

In my last post, the holiday camps had just ended and I was looking at starting to train on some of the activities at camp. I ended up training on the giant swing, the flying fox, and the rockwall. It took a couple weeks for me to train and be assessed on the activities. But once that was done, I moved on to leading activities on my own for rental groups. I'm only a casual employee, so I don't work too much. I just come in and help when they have particularly big groups or busy days or someone is off. It is often school groups that I end up working for and I just run activities for them. Most schools that come in break up into small groups and set up a rotation through some or all of the activities around camp. There are often 3 or 4 sessions a day on the busy days. On those days I will often come in for either a half day or the whole day and run any of those 3 activities I am certified to run. On a busy week I'll usually work 2-3 days (not all full days) but I have had at least one week so far where they didn't need me at all. So I am not too busy. I am enjoying it a lot. I like getting to be around camp and continue to get a better idea of how it all works and runs on a day to day basis. I also like having something to do. With the summer camps ended, I was wondering what I would find to fill my time. It is great that this gives me a bit of something to do and also I get to feel a bit like I am being helpful to those around me rather than just being a freeloading tourist all the time. Well I still am a freeloading tourist all the time, but this makes me feel a bit better about it somehow. Like I have a bit of a purpose in being here all the time or something.

When I am not at camp I have been trying to get out and continue to see as much as I can. I have gotten much better and more comfortable with driving. I started out fairly slow and cautious. Just little trips into places like Ulverstone, Latrobe, and Devonport. But as I got more comfortable I went a bit further. Last week I drove myself all the way out to Beauty Point to go the Platypus House. I also drove myself into a friends house in Burnie. I got rather lost on that one though. But that was more a lesson in making sure I know where I am going before I leave and making sure I have data on my phone than about the driving itself.

I have had people take me to do some awesome things over the last month as well. I went to Tasmazia with Tamara and Alex and the girls. I went kayaking down the Leven river with Alex and Matt. Last week I went down to Snug with Fiona and Sarah Hingston for Sarah's guides regatta. And I have just gotten home from spending another weekend at the Gates' house in Burnie. I have heaps of photos to share and stories to tell from these adventures. I am planning to do that in a couple installments over the next week. I figured it was a bit too much to try to cram it all into one post.

My New Zealand trip is starting to feel like it is coming up quick and I am getting excited. Rachael and I have started talking about how we should really get to planning it. She is a bit more organized about it all than I am. But we are going to book the last of our flights this week. Our plans have changed a bit since I got here. I decided that rather than going over in mid April, I wanted to stay here until the end of April. There are a couple of holiday camps that run in the last couple weeks of April and I wanted to stay for them. I am actually a program director for one of them. But I didn't know I would be at the time I decided to stay. Anyways, Rachael gets off work at the start of April still and wanted to leave shortly after work ended. So she is going to come here now! She is going to spend April here with me and see a bit of Camp Clayton and Tassie. And then we will head over to New Zealand together at the beginning of May. One of the things I am most excited about, like can't sleep at night if I think about it too much excited, is that on our way over we are going to stop in Brisbane and go the the Australia Zoo. That is Steve Irwin's zoo and I have looked it up and you can hold a koala there. You can hold and pet quite a few animals actually, so you can imagine where my excitement is coming from. We are just going to spend a month in New Zealand now and Rachael is going to fly home from New Zealand while I am going to come back to Tassie for a week or so to get all my stuff together and say goodbye before I head home. 

It is weird to think that I am just over half way through my trip. It has gone by fast and I am starting to think more about going home. I don't really have any idea what I am going to do with myself when I get back.