Our first Hobart Royal Show

Thursday 23rd October 2008
It is a very strange thing for us, but Hobart has a public holiday for the show. Show day is always a Thursday apparently, don't ask me why it is not a Friday. Everyone has the day off and then has to go back to work on the Friday for one day before the weekend, but if you are smart you take the Friday off. I will learn this for next year.

In our usual show tradition we got up early and headed into town. The weather was going to be very warm for the day and we keep forgetting though that we are not on the mainland and things over here are a little more laid back. In Adelaide if we wanted a free car park spot on the street we had to get to town at 7.30am. In Hobart you don't have to rock up until at least 9.00am - 9.30am. The first place that we headed for was the animals, not before Tao had seen the most enormous jumping castle (as pictured). Now that we have goats, I was really interested in seeing all the different types of goats and asked lots of questions, for which no one seemed to be bothered by. I ended up talking to a lady that I am going to be doing a goat husbandry course with on the weekend, and she was full of information so I was quite excited about this.

Our next stop was to look at the motor bikes who were doing tricks on their bikes pretty high up in the air. It was pretty good to see but this did not keep the kids entertained for very long before they were asking to go on a ride or two. Off we went to side show alley and chose a couple of different jumping castles for the boys. The one that Tao went on was far too high for Kai and I knew that Kai would not go on it so he went on a different one. They had a ball of course and this proved to be exhausting and thirsty work for them so about 11am we had lunch.

I must say, the show was a hell of a lot smaller than the Adelaide one, which meant that we managed to go around the whole thing by about 2-3pm. Despite this we had a great time, saw some people that we knew and the kids headed to the show bag hall on the way out.

Once we had got into the car and the kids were starting to tear their show bag apart they promptly reminded us that we did not go on the dodgem cars. We had been talking about going on them a few days before hand, but with all the excitement about what to see next we forgot all about them. The Huonville show is coming up so maybe we will go on them then.

On the way home we decided to head down to our favourite beach at Kingston. This is where we always have our ice cream at a little cafe that looks out onto the water. The beach here is awesome, white sand and a good swell but not too big. We quite often go down to the beach and make sand castles and look over to the other side of the peninsula. There are some photos included of this. We also have the most amazing rainbows like I have never seen. The most at one time I have seen have been three bands. What a sight.