Room at the End of the World?

I had a friend once who would often say to me that life is far more stranger than fiction and Jeffery Kripal seems to be writing the same thing in his books that I've read, but the truth is that if you keep your eyes open and have a look around it really is stranger than fiction. 

Walking towards my motel room at Wrest Point Casino

I couldn't help thinking I was in the
Overlook Hotel from The Shining

You can probably tell from the above pictures that Kubrick movies have played a big part in my life:-)
Although, my eldest son is a big Simon Pegg fan, which is why I dropped into the World's End Brew Pub later when walking back to my motel after my bus trip.

I had just spent the afternoon frolicking in something I had never seen before in my life ... real life that is ... snow.

I know what it feels like now Jack

The only reason I came across this stuff on Mt. Wellington/Kunyani was because I decided to go for a walk around the motel grounds of Wrest Point Casino and saw the big mountain that wasn't really visible to me on Friday, when I had lunch in the revolving restaurant at the top of the casino, which I wrote about in this post - 
Revolver

Mt. Wellington/Kunyani in the
distance from the casino

I asked the guy working the front door of the Wrest Point Casino if it was possible to drive up that mountain in the distance and he told me it was, so I thought that looked like something worth making the trip to the top of, and I started figuring out how I would get there.

Mt. Wellington/Kunyani in the distance

The Cascade Brewery, which I would
return to on this bus on Sunday

There's that creepy UFO fountain again

As luck would have it there was a leaflet advertising the Hobart double-decker buses that loop the city stopping at this casino and the Cascade Brewery, which I was doing a tour of on Sunday.
But if you paid for a $65 dollar ticket you could also ride the shuttle bus from the city to Mt. Wellington/Kunyani, plus it was a 48-hour ticket, so I could use it to go to the brewery from the casino tomorrow and not worry about driving.

  A replica of Mawson's Hut

I caught the double-decker bus to the city visitor centre, where I had to hop off to catch the shuttle bus up to the top of the mountain.

And since it wasn't leaving for half an hour, I had a walk around and got some fish and chips for lunch. 
There was a replica of Mawson's Hut showing pictures of the real hut covered in snow in Antarctica and I wondered if I would ever see any real snow in my own lifetime ... little did I know that in about an hour I would.

A floating fish and chip shop in
Hobart where I bought lunch

I hopped on the shuttle bus thinking I was just going to get a good view of Hobart from a high mountain, and the bus driver said it snows on the top of the mountain and that last week it snowed on top of it, but it hadn't snowed since.
I thought just my luck to be a week too late, but as we approached the top, patches of snow could be seen outside the bus window, and it sent my heart racing to think that this was the day I would finally see snow in a place I least expected to find it.

The first sight of real snow from my bus window

The top of Mt. Wellington/Kunyani

Someone had even made a snowman ...
which was the first real snowman I had seen

My first snowball

Kunyani the snowman?
I might call it Jack;-)

Looking back to my motel, Wrest Point Casino, from the mountaintop

I started to get cold feet about being
up this high for some reason:-)

Ah, back to the warmth of the shuttle bus

Saint Raphael’s Church on the
mountain from the bus window

The bus driver told us that this little church pictured above had survived three major bushfires, while the pub across the road was burned down and rebuilt three times.
And it is a wooden church, as well.
But the church's website says it only survived two bushfires.

St Raphael’s Fern Tree

I couldn't get a decent shot of the church on the day, so I snatched the one from the church website to show what it looks like outside of a moving bus.
Also, chillingly enough, the last bushfire the church survived in 1967, 62 people would lose their lives in -
1967 Tasmanian fires
"The 1967 Tasmanian fires were an Australian natural disaster which occurred on 7 February 1967, an event which came to be known as the Black Tuesday bushfires. They were the most deadly bushfires that Tasmania has ever experienced, leaving 62 people dead, 900 injured and over seven thousand homeless."
The bus driver made the comment that people must have short memories, because people have rebuilt in the same areas again, with the bush all around their homes.
Let's hope there is no repeat of that awful day.

Walking back to my motel room I came across a coffee shop with my name literally on it, so I stopped in for a long black.

After the coffee I walked down the road further and ducked into the World's End Brew Pub for a dark ale and to snap some photos to show my oldest son, who loves the movie 'The World's End'.

This pub was a real cool little pub, with the walls plastered in comic books.

Inside the World's End Brew Pub

There were even games to play with,
if you had friends to play with:-(

My son would have loved this place, as he is into all these types of comic book heroes and villains.

Even the tabletops are plastered in comics

I bought a really nice dark house ale for $5 and sat down near the window and watched the world go by.

Then I thought I would get a picture of the word BREW from the inside window looking out, which made it look like WERB, which kind of reminded me of the word "MURDER" being spelled backwards in the Kubrick movie version of 'The Shining'.

Maybe I should have been drinking RED RUM?-)

Room 237?

And that's when I couldn't believe what my eyes were seeing across the road from me.
A local politician named Matthew Groom had his office on 237 Sandy Bay Road?!

Groom 237?!
You're s#!ting me, right?

Tasmania, The World's End?

You just couldn't make this stuff up if you tried. 

It's so cold down here they wrap the
burgers in foil. Never seen that before

Not believing the day's events could possibly have unfolded like they had, I grabbed a burger from a van parked outside the casino and walked back to my motel room to get ready for a concert that was on in the casino that night.

The show I saw on that Saturday night at the casino

But that is for another post -
The APIA Tour: Rules Are Made to Be Broken ... or, What Would Jesus Do?-)