Day 12 - 5/2/2014 - Boarding the Spirit of Tasmania
We were booked on the night time voyage on the Spirit of Tasmania so we didn’t have to check in until 5pm for a scheduled departure time of 7:30pm. Because we weren’t familiar with the area where the boarding happens and we had heard that there was a very low bridge on the route that the GPS takes you which has claimed few caravans, we decided to do a test run without the camper to work out how to get there, how long it was going to take us to get there, and make sure we didn’t take the route with the low bridge! We worked out it was going to take close to an hour to travel the 28km to get to the dock so we left the van park at 4pm.
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| Ready to battle Melbourne traffic, again! |
We negotiated the traffic, and arrived at the check-in gates right on 5pm and drove onto the boat at 6:15pm.
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| The Spirit of Tasmania |
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| Security checkpoint to unload loose gas bottles. |
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| All aboard! |
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| Melbourne skyline from the loading ramp. |
It was good to get on the ship early because it gave us a chance get to our cabin and unpack and explore the boat before it started moving.
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| Watching the vehicles loading from our cabin window. |
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| Melbourne skyline panorama |
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| Melbourne skyline |
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| Sunset |
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| The calm before the storm! |
Even though the gale force winds from the day before had eased off, they were still stating 30 knot winds with a 2.5m to 3.5m swell across Bass Strait. It was going to be an interesting night to say the least!
Hi, Swish digs mate. We had an internal cabin last trip, not that we missed out on any view as it was dark as we left and arrived.
ReplyDeleteI once traveled on the 'Ocean Recliners' - never again - I'll swag it on the floor if I'm traveling solo on a budget.
cheers
Yeah the accommodation was pretty good. My wife doesn't exactly have sea legs so we wanted to be as comfortable as possible if things got bad.
ReplyDeleteSteve