I was up early for my usual walk this morning, and while I did not plan on writing any more about Ross, I discovered a few new gems that I wanted to document.

It was still pretty dark at 7am when I headed out for my walk. In two days time though, things will improve when daylight saving ends here in Tassie, as well as in other states. I won’t have to get up in the dark.

No, I did nothing with the lighting. This is how it looked just before the sun fully emerged and while the lights were still on it. It looked eerie.

One thing I was cautious of as I walked the lonely streets this morning was untethered dogs. I really like dogs, but I am wary of ones I don’t know, particularly if they are barking at me. There were two occurrences for me to make a swift U turn on my route before I headed (safely) home for breakfast.

Walking from the bridge towards the site of the Female Factory I passed the remains of the old stables. They were almost in the backyard of this church.

I was very surprised to spot dozens and dozens of rabbits on my walk. If you look closely you can possibly see their scratchings and droppings in the church yard. Perhaps they are just getting ready for Easter.

Then a few hundred metres on from the Female Factory site was the original cemetery. While I did not find any headstones for the female convicts (not that I expected to), there were lots of headstones dating back to the mid to late 1800s.

There are always a lot of questions to be posed walking through old headstones. William was 27 years older than his wife, who obviously died way too early. But it doesn’t appear that he remarried following her death.

Then I stumbled across something much more modern and much brighter. I had to get up close to appreciate the time and attention someone has devoted to creating a little wonderland in Ross.

These were wooden doors that had been painted in bright colours to create a fence for this home. I thought that was pretty impressive.

But there was more.

Each door had its own individual piece of artwork painted on the reverse side.

We left Ross around 9.30am and headed for Hobart – about an hour away. As we came into the city we found ourselves caught in the wrong lane which resulted in us crossing the mighty Derwent River via the Tasman Bridge. Luckily we could do a U turn safely a few minutes after we were across and we got ourselves back on the right track.

Mick recalled that this bridge had collapsed at some stage, but he could not recall all the details.

The Tasman Bridge disaster occurred in 1975 when a large carrier collided with several of the bridge’s pylons. Four cars tumbled from the bridge, and sadly 12 people died.

As we drove into the city, as we are staying quite close to Salamanca Markets at Battery Point, we were both impressed by the buildings, parks, stadiums and waterfronts. It seemed so much smarter than when we visited it back in 1999.

We went for a walk to get our bearings and found a few places we remembered from our last visit.

And we even had lunch of fish and chips at the same place we’d had it 23 years before on the Elizabeth Street Pier – a place called Fish Frenzy – which opened in late 1998, so was relatively new when we visited in 1999.

We have a full day trip to Bruny Island booked for tomorrow. And the weather looks as though it is going to be pretty chilly. But we are looking forward to it regardless.