A Vacation Within A Vacation

Jen and I decided that we had been pretty busy so far in Australia, so we wanted to take it super easy for the last few days that we have left.

We decided to head down the south coast for a couple of days to a small little town called Robe. Robe is one of those towns that when you see a sign in a store detailing their opening hours, there are 2 sets of times - "High Season" and "Low Season". In the summer it is a busy little place with tourists busting out of the seams, but in winter it is a sleepy little fishing town. Later in December, High Season would be in full effect, but right now it is still a pretty quiet little place.

We packed up the car this morning, said goodbye to Shari, Leon and Alison who are heading back to Brisbane today and set off down the coast. The drive is about 4 to 5 hours long depending how many stops you make etc.

One of the larger towns along the way is Kingston. Generally speaking, Kingston is most famous for Larry The Big Lobster. Larry was supposed to be mounted on the roof of a local business, but the builders made a mistake when translating the plans into reality (something like using meters instead of feet or something) and Larry ended up being many times bigger than he was meant to be, so much so that it was not structurally possible to put him on the roof of the business anymore. So now he stands at the northern entrance to the town and is a perennial tourist attraction. Here are Jen and Callum standing underneath Larry - you will need to look closely as Larry is actually genuinely pretty big, so Jen and Callum are pretty small in the pictures.


Now some of you may be feeling a little confused about Larry - he doesn't look much like a Lobster you would get from the northeast of the US for example. So here is the scoop. Larry the Lobster is actually designed after the Saltwater Spiny Lobster, which do not have the trademark big claws. To confuse matters more, in most of Australia they are commonly called a Crayfish (different to a Crawfish though from the southern US). So why on earth it is "Larry the Lobster", when everyone in that part of the world calls them Crayfish (or just "Crays") is beyond me. Anyway, enough of the biology lesson.

After we had finished basking in Larry's glow, we continued on to Robe. We ate out at one of the local pubs tonight and are chilling out tonight catching up on episodes of The Flight of the Conchords that we haven't seen yet. Oh, and we are drinking. Did I mention that I like party leftovers?