Midlands 2015-#17N

I was heading northwards to run a day of professional learning for teachers in Campbell Town, followed by meetings in Launceston. My colleague and I had heard that there had been a truck roll-over on the highway, but that light traffic was being allowed through. This may have been true for a while during the morning as we travelled, but one kilometre south of the accident site we reached the end of a stationary line of cars, and over the next half-an-hour north-bound cars accumulated behind us.

The vehicle in front of us was a utility truck, with its tray and additional trailer filled with sheep. We suspect that they may have had a reprieve for the day when the driver decided to give up on waiting and to turn around and head south again … but not before I had taken a few photos.

We sat and waited for a while longer, and I phoned in a traffic report to Hobart’s ABC radio station, but with the start time for the professional learning session rapidly approaching we needed to make a decision. On hearing that the road was expected to be closed for at least another hour, and having checked some map apps for an alternative route, we pulled out of the queue, headed south for a bit, and then headed into the wilds of the east midlands, where I’d never been, following obscure back roads around twists and turns, and through paddocks full of sheep bouncing across the road in front of us, well beyond the range of phone reception. Some 70km and over one hour later we finally came into Ross (its famous church shown below), and we reached Campbell Town about 75 minutes after the intended start time for the PL session. Fortunately another colleague from Launceston was able to run her component of the day’s program to cover for our delay. The other fortunately was that we still managed to beat some of the teachers who had stayed in the queue, with them arriving a further half an hour after we did.

I didn’t get a chance to take any photos of the back roads apart from the through-the-windscreen-on-the-move shot of the church (you can imagine we were in a hurry, and we had to pay attention to the driving conditions and the navigation), but there was some interesting country out there, and I think I might go back some day and do some exploring in a slightly more leisurely fashion.