Internet meltdown

Hi there.  I never truly appreciated the quality of our home broadband connection until I tried to blog from rural Tasmania.  I’m currently sitting in the lounge of our accommodation in St Helen’s, which is on the north-east coast of Tasmania.  It’s a smallish seaside town, although there aren’t too many visitors on the streets right now – school holidays begin in early December, so things will pick up soon we’re assured.

Anyway, St Helen’s is not the remotest part of Tassie we’ve been to, but the broadband here is so meagre that embedding photos with my posts is proving impossible.  I’ll therefore continue to stockpile material until we log on to a broadband connection worthy of the description (I already have a week’s backlog due to previous Internet access problems.)

For the same reason, Julie is unable to upload photos to Flickr, and we’re even struggling to connect to email.  Normal service will be resumed in due course, but quite possibly not be before we get to Melbourne eight days from now.

So, what can you look forward to from the Platypus?  Here are some of things I’ll be writing about and illustrating with Julie’s photos:

• Tasmanian Devils – both in the wild and part of the captive breeding programme
• Wombats … lots of cute wombats
• Penguins (again)
• Logging (again)
• Inspiring gardens
• Amazing scenery
• More birds of the week
• Kangaroos (at last!)
• The voyages of Captain Quirk (aka Julie)
• The road to hell (aka the rough slippery twisting gravel road with the sheer drop on Julie’s side that we took today over the mountains as we journeyed between two waterfalls.  Spoiler alert: we survived, but I aged a couple of years in the process.)

So do keep logging on.  I’ll keep posting even after we’re back in the UK until the story is fully told.  I bet you can hardly contain your excitement.

And much, much more.