Monkey Business

Although we had gone to bed early the night before it didn’t mean that we were going to wake up early. Will had to be up early for work and had clunked around in the kitchen, slightly waking us up but we made no effort to actually get up. Soon we were up and moving, making toast and chatting when Claire joined us in the kitchen. We were planning to go to Will’s friend, Carlos’ house for a BBQ and Claire was messaging the friend to see when we could come up. That’s when Carlos told Claire he was in celebration mode which kinda worried us all. There is a story here but you’ll have to ask us about it when we get back to the US. We ended up changing our minds and not going to BBQ but staying around town and exploring the park and several museums in the city. We stopped by the art museum first which had a lot of hands on science gadgets to try out which amused Riley and myself for quite some time. We even had to see taxidermy Tasmanian devils!

We couldn’t stay for long since our parking meter would run out but we were alright with that since we got to move on other things. We drove into town and parked near the city park to check out the car museum. Riley had found out about the museum on the internet but with it costing over $12 he wasn’t sure if he wanted to go in or not. There was a gift shop that showed just about everything that was in the museum though, so we decided to opt out on actually going in. Instead we hopped across the street to the city park to play a lifesize game of chess and check out the monkeys! Claire beat Riley in the abbreviated game of best two out of three pieces in chess and the monkeys got the rest of our attention.

Apparently Launceston has a sister city in Japan that gave them Japanese monkeys and Launceston gave them wombats. We don’t know if that’s a fair trade or not, but we were definitely glad that we got the monkeys. They were very entertaining, especially the three baby monkeys that we running around and jumping and swinging off everything. The majority of the monkey’s day is spent looking for and picking off fleas from the other monkey’s fur. We don’t understand how they can really have that many fleas or insects or whatever they were looking for. We didn’t really know what to do after the monkeys since they were just so entertaining but Claire told us that there were a few geocaches hidden throughout the park and asked if we wanted to give it a go. We agreed since we’d never done it before and were lucky enough to find our first one with a lot of Claire’s hints. We weren’t so lucky with the second one, but Claire hasn’t found that one either. Afterwards we just shopped around town, got toasties for lunch and just wasted away the afternoon. It was approaching five o’clock and Claire had somewhere to be so we dropped by Will’s office to see when he would be going home. The second State of Origin game was on tonight and we were planning to go to a pub to catch the game. Will said he would be sticking around his office for a while and could give us a ride home later if we wanted to but we were more interested in just exploring the city a little and staying out until the game.

They warned us that everything would be closing up at 5 o’clock, and naïve us didn’t really believe them. However, they were right and our options were limited after 5, but Target stayed open and had tablets with wifi on them! We spent a long while surfing the internet and coloring some pictures for the photo contest (no we didn’t submit our perfectly colored ninja turtles). Soon it was time to head towards the Sports Bar in town and catch the game that we thought started at 8 PM. It turned out to start around 8:30 so we had quite a bit of time to wait again but we didn’t mind since we were inside and away from the cold. This pub was a lot quieter than the ones we’re used to in Sydney, but it made for a better viewing of the game since there weren’t any people in the way. We were really hoping that NSW would come out with a  second win, but unfortunately Queensland scored within the first 2 minutes and it just went downhill from there. At halftime NSW still hadn’t scored and we were just hoping it wouldn’t be a shutout. Right off the bat they scored but weren’t able to overcome the twenty points that Queensland had scored. That left the State of Origin score tied with one more game to go in another three weeks. It really is interesting how their ‘superbowls’ work.