August 8

Bruce had a pleasant surprise when he saw the picture he had submitted to the local newspaper had won a prize. The prize is a mini poster of his picture and the picture published in the paper. Here's the winning picture of the nut at Stanley.
This week was the first time I started to feel a bit home sick. I think it was because I showed the slides of Innisfail to a couple of groups. The first was the local Red Cross ladies. They meet once a month and mainly do knitting and some fund raising for the Red Cross. The other was the Legacy Wives. This group of women are widows of men who served in the armed forces. The week also had me leading the two Bible study groups and preparing for Sunday. I was the worship leader and preacher so I didn't need to meet with anyone and the service was a lot like one we would have in Innisfail. I did meet with Rev. Peter Hall. Peter is working on writing a disertation on Pastoral Care in Uniting Church and one of his points of comparison is the United Church of Canada. He was visiting Tasmania and quite excited to find someone from the United Church. He would like to do some ministry in Canada similar to what I have done here. I attended a meeting of a group called Probis. This women's group is part of Rotary and all members have to be over 50 years of age. The purpose of the group is fellowship and at this meeting some Alpaca owners were the special guests. They brought some baby alpacas and gave a presentation that was informative and interesting. I learned lots about the alpaca industry in Tasmania. We had a busy week but not to busy to travel around. We decided to go to the Cherry Shack. The Cherry Shack has a display of how they grow and develop their cherries as well as tasting of their products. They had a tree made of pits in the middle of the restaurant and that is what you can see in the picture. The Cherry Shack is in Latrobe which is the platypus capital so we went looking for a platypus but all we saw was the large display that I am standing beside. We also went to Anvers chocolate factory. This is a small specialty chocolate establishment. It also has a small museum about the history of Chocolate making and a great tasting center. It was like chocolate heaven!! We even stayed for tea in the restaurant for more chocolate. We decided to go to Hawley Beach near Port Sorrel. It has a trail you can walk on to see nesting birds. It looks like some of the male penguins come back in August to build the nests. We are hoping to go one evening to see if we can see penguins. This came as a pleasant surprise that we may see penguins. We spent our Saturday afternoon travelling around and went up to a national park. It was expensive so we didn't go in. We saw lots of wombats and were able to take a couple of pictures. This park is now on our list to do in the next two weeks. We went to a beautiful spot called Green's Beach and had a nice long walk on the beach.


I focused the Sunday Service on faith and faithful being verbs not nouns. There is a special couple who truly live their faith at Deloraine and I could have used them as a sermon illustrations. This couple took us out for lunch to the Raspberry Farm Cafe--another restaurant with tasting. The best taste here was dark raspberry chocolates. I think this week had a theme of lots of good eating. This couple also took us for a drive in the country and we saw a wombat suffering from mange. It was a very sad sight as the poor creature was really suffering. We had heard about this condition but this was the first time we had seen it. A huge difference to the healthy one in the picture.
Next week will be as busy as this one and I hope all of you have a great week. Blessings to IUC.