It was a long, long night last night. I have had a cold for nearly our entire holiday, and Nathan has come down with it as well. He has had a bad cough for a couple of days, but last night he woke up with his coughing, was very upset and was crying as well. It all meant that he had a really hard time breathing until we could calm him down, and he found his difficulty in breathing to be very distressing as well. Of course all the noise of his coughing and crying woke Toby up too, so he started crying….suffice to say we had two very unhappy children for a while. Nathan ended up sleeping in bed with us, which doesn’t work for Toby because he doesn’t have room to roll over in his sleep. So Toby was a lot more wakeful during the night than normal, which meant that I was too. Between Toby’s wakefulness and Nathan’s coughing fits and my worrying about his fever and breathing, there wasn’t much sleep happening for me, and probably only a little more for Andrew.

When the day finally started, it pretty much drizzled all morning. We went to the Port Arthur historical site…by car this time. While we waited for the 40-minute walking tour, we checked out our criminals. When we paid for entry we were given a playing card each, and we had to find our convicts and read about them. I had a 35-year-old who was transported from England for stealing from a house. After the walking tour we went on the 20-minute boat tour before having lunch and regrettably deciding that we had better start driving or we wouldn’t make it to Coles Bay for the night where we had a cabin booked. Port Arthur was a very interesting place, and we could have easily spent a lot more time there, though Nathan and Toby need to be a bit older for them to really appreciate the place.

We left the peninsula and decided to take a road north that the GPS didn’t seem to want us to take. It ended up being a lot shorter in kilometers, but only gained us 6 minutes (according to the car GPS), and it was on mostly dirt roads that were a bit rough at times. We also got to see some unexpected lookouts over Great Oyster Bay. Nathan had a terrible time with his coughing in the car, but thankfully he fell asleep for a while.

We stopped at Swansea to get petrol and to also go to a Pharmacy to see if there was anything that we could get that might help Nathan. His biggest problem is that he wheezes and that is causing him to cough, but besides suggesting an expectorant there wasn’t much else they could suggest except a long, hot shower to help his wheezing. The kids had a play in a playground while I bought some things for dinner, and then it was back on the road for the final haul to Coles Bay.

Our cabin was much bigger than the one we had in Hobart, though smaller that the Port Arthur one, and it had bunk beds in one of the two bedrooms. It was the first set of bunks that we have come across that didn’t have removable ladders, so we had a hard time keeping the kids out of the room. Nathan thought it was great climbing to the top bunk, as did Toby, but we really couldn’t let Toby play on the top bunk unsupervised, so the room was off limits. Even in sparsely furnished places, the kids manage to find so many things that they shouldn’t touch that it becomes draining to continuously tell them not to do things.

Anyway, I do hope that Nathan has a better night tonight.

Picking flowers in the grass at Port Arthur

Spiky Bridge near Orford

Pkayground at the caravan park

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 6th, 2011 at 8:00 pm and is filed under Tasmania, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.