Saturday, 1 December 2007
The flight to Launceston departed mid-afternoon, and, as a result there was an opportunity for Madam to indulge in a little retail therapy before lunch and a Skybus transfer to Tullamarine where we experienced another delayed departure.
Launceston Airport is comfortably south of the city itself, and, once negotiations associated with car rental had been completed we headed a little further south to the night’s accommodation at historic Clarendon House (one of the great Georgian Regency houses of Australia) on the banks of the South Esk River - the same river, coincidentally, that runs through the Gorge in Launceston.
The mansion itself was built in the 1830s for James Cox, a grazier, merchant, and son of the man who supervised building the first road over the Blue Mountains in New South Wales.
On arrival we discovered a wedding reception in progress, and decided that the festivities did not need to be disturbed by a couple of mainlanders in search of their overnight accommodation. A quick phone call was all that as needed to catch up with the proprietor, locate the accommodation and arrange for dinner and a bottle of wine.
Dinner took the form of a steak dish and a seafood platter, both of which featured in the catering arrangements for the wedding, and the request for a bottle of something red resulted in a Yalumba Y Series Merlot at a standard mark-up rather than the bottle of expensive and extravagantly marked-up boutique wine a less considerate operator might have chosen.
The accommodation in a cottage that probably dates back well into the century before last was comfortable and delivered a good night’s sleep completely undisturbed by the revelry occurring across the paddock.