Monday 12th March - Cockle Creek to Hobart

We were going to go and explore Bruny Island, however it is much the same as Cockle Creek so we decided to forgo it and go up to Hobart and the Tasman Peninsula. We made it up to Hobart after lunch and after a few difficulties found a caravan park to stay in just out of Hobart.
I had 3 places that I wanted to go to whilst in Hobart:
1. MONA (The Museum of Old and New Art)
2. Mount Wellington
3. The Salamanca Markets (Saturday only)
On arriving at the caravan park I discovered that MONA was closed on Tuesdays. So we piled into the car and spent the rest of the afternoon at MONA. It is an amazing place. It has it's own winery and beer (Moobrew) as well as some fantastic indoor and outdoor facilities. They also have accommodation there. But the place you come to see is the museum. Kids under 18 are free. On arrival everyone gets an iPhone device as none of the exhibits are labelled. As you move through the museum you touch the pink circle and it automatically tells you what pieces are in your location. You can click on a love or hate button with each piece and it tells you how many people think the same or differently to you. If you want further details other than the artist and materials used you click another button called 'art wank' and it gives yo more details. Loved it. The building is amazing and if I were an Architect like my brother in law Simon I would probably appreciate it even more. The collection is very eclectic. There are some areas not appropriate for kids so Ed and I took turns to go in. The exhibit that amazed & grossed out the kids was the 'Poo Machine!' It is basically a series of large containers with loads of tubing that imitates a digestive system and it does a poo at the end of it. We even watched them feeding the poo machine! Olivia wrote in her journal that she didn't like the poo machine. I must admit it did smell a bit! I really enjoyed myself seeing the way they mixed the old and the new art using lots of multimedia. It was great. I can't believe that the kids lasted so long there and for the most part enjoyed as well. They also contributed towards an art piece which is being collected. It was a graphite rubbing on stones. I believe that they are collecting thousands of these rubbings for the artist to create a large scale piece of art. That was exciting for the kids. Even Ed enjoyed himself at MONA too.

This is difficult to see. It is a wall of fine water jets with different words spelt out at around 5 second intervals. Charlotte was fascinated trying to read all the words.
We treated the kids we all had takeaway food for dinner and then drove back to our campsite. When we got there we could see another trailer right next to ours when there was heaps of space. Ed was slightly outraged until we discovered that it was our friends again from Port Huon Mick and Angela. We had hot showers and did the laundry and relaxed for the evening. The kids also had a long play in the playground with a family of 3 boys who came over on the same boat as us.