Checking in was one of those painless affairs, completely free of actual human contact and conducted by phone and a cache of keys. The proprietress was messing about with a boat, but had spotted The Blue Bug’s arrival, so she knew we were there. There are a variety of cottages on offer, and we ended up in Tasmanian Oak, right down the front looking out over the water, which suited us just fine. I was keen to sit down and get stuck into the Travelogue, which was starting to fall alarmingly behind, but was inveigled into heading off for a walk to see if we could rustle up anything extra in the dinner department.
Basically, we were after something to go with bread and cheese since we’d picked up a fresh loaf at the Red Velvet Lounge. We still had our portion of GrandVewe cheese to go with it, but you can always add something if there’s something fresh that catches your eye.
Fresh oysters, for example.
As it turned out the grocery options were rather limited, and were a fair hike from the accommodation. The stroll took us past what appeared to be a fishery depot, which had Hughesy thinking oysters as you do, but when we’d made our way to the Dover Grocer the girl behind the counter delivered a minor surprise by pointing out that the IGA Supermarket was better stocked. The two operations share the same owner, so there’s a certain logic involved, though I failed to see why you’d be discouraging the customers from the get go.
There was, however, a rather interesting selection of local wines at the Grocer, and I gave some thought to shuffling the Pinot Noir back for later consumption, a thought that lasted as long as it took to grab a bottle off Dover Grocer private label, take a squiz at the label, note that it was sourced from Warburn Estate and bore the generic Southeastern Australian Geographic Indicator.
It went back on the shelf, and that was the end of that little theory.
Across the road at the IGA the pickings were similarly thin. Bread, cheese and Pinot Noir was always going to be an adequate repast, so we hoofed it back to Driftwood. Checking on the free WiFi Madam picked up on a financial scare that had her heading down to the public phone to check with the credit card company with Hughesy in tow before I was able to get down to Travelogue tapping.