When the cruise was finished, we packed into the van and headed to our final destination at the far north of Bruny: the Jetty Cafe. We had a lovely late lunch and I couldn’t resist capping the weekend off with a local brew.

I never say no to pavlova.

Right on schedule, our transport back to Hobart arrived! An actual seaplane from Tasmanian Air Adventures.

Rob and Ollie helped the pilot drag it up to the beach so our bags could get loaded on.

We were excited! Neither of us had ever flown in a seaplane before.

Not only that, but I was going to be sitting in the co-pilot’s seat! Here I am climbing into the plane.

I turned back to get a shot of the Snook climbing on board. We had to take our shoes off and wade out onto the pontoons. It felt very Indiana Jones.

My view of the cockpit. The plane was an oldie, the pilot said, but in peak working order!

Spinning up the propeller. (Propellers do very funny things in digital cameras.)

Here’s the Snook’s view as we started to speed up.

And we’re airborne!

Here I am “flying” the seaplane. (In actuality I was afraid to touch the controls, as my steering wheel was connected to the real pilot’s!)

We all wore headphones so we could hear each other over the noise of the engine.

Bellerive Oval as seen from above.

The Snook experimented with the tilt-shift mode on his camera. Little toy houses!

Edited to clarify: He says this isn’t tilt-shift at all! The houses really are that bright.

I like the look on Rodd’s face here.

More weird propeller effects.

Oh hey, there’s the Tasman Bridge! We learned from Rob and Ollie about the terrible disaster in ’75 when a ship struck one of the pylons and collapsed the center portion of the deck.

Twelve people died in the disaster. They rebuilt it and they’ve got more safety precautions in place now. Our taxi driver told us that they even stop traffic when boats are passing underneath, just in case.

Here we are back in Hobart on Sunday night! The plane dropped us off right next to our hotel.

What a fantastic weekend. Seriously, I can’t recommend the Bruny Island Long Weekend enough. The guy who runs it, Rob, is a great bloke who knows Bruny like the back of his hand. He’s also a fantastic chef and host! What he’s created is unlike any other packaged tour that I’ve seen. I would do it again in a heartbeat.

We checked back in to the Grand Chancellor and decided to check out Salamanca for dinner. Frankly, the options weren’t very inspiring. We ended up just grabbing some pub food at the Squires Bounty.

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