A short day took us from Railton to Sheffield.
With a short — only 12 km — day to Sheffield, CareFree and I again weren’t in a big rush to get up and go. Around 9, we walked back to the Limestone Cafe Bakery for breakfast, which was good. While we were there, still before checkout time, weirdly, the owner of our hotel called us, afraid we’d checked out and taken the key with us. (Checkout time was at 10, it was still plenty before that.)
Unlike yesterday, it was cloudy and overcast. We never really got blue skies today, though the sun tried its hardest to poke through the clouds, and occasionally they thinned enough to see a blue tint through them.
A short walk from our hotel took us past a large mural on the side of a building, “Railton’s Great Elephant Race”. Apparently, in the 1950s, once when the circus came to town on the railroad, two of the town’s businessmen arranged to race elephants down the main street. The sign accompanying the mural claimed this was a “wonderful and unique story” in the town’s history. Granted, I’m being a little cynical here, but, surely there’s been a more interesting story or impactful event in Railton’s history that would be worthy of a mural than an elephant race?
Shortly after the mural, we turned off the sidewalk and joined a rail trail, which was also part of a large network of cycle paths in the area.
The rail trail took us through Sykes Sanctuary, a 40-acre tract of land donated by resident Norman Sykes to be used as a nature sanctuary. The sanctuary itself was nice, though in a picnic area on a hilltop, Norman’s son had erected a somewhat eccentric (to put it mildly) monument, combining math “equations” and numerology into a monument that evoked a comparison to “time cube” crackpottery.
After leaving the nature sanctuary, we followed more paved roads for a little while, branching off onto a dirt, and then gravel cycle track separated from the road. We passed farms, and cows, and some nice wildflowers as well.
After not seeing any snakes on Walk the Yorke, we finally saw a lowland copperhead. It was sitting on a log adjacent to the trail; we didn’t initially see it until it moved to slither off into the woods.
When we were in New Zealand, we saw traffic cones in all sorts of random places that didn’t seem to have a purpose. (Often, but not exclusively, along backcountry dirt roads.) In Tasmania, instead it seems to be tires. Along one of the cycle paths we followed, there were no end of tires, either sitting there individually, or in piles of various sizes. It’s not limited to alongside the road, though. Yesterday, we saw a large pile of tires next to piles of bales of hay in a farm.
The trail eventually entered private property, along the edge of a farm — fortunately along a wide dirt road inside the fence line, rather than on the very narrow path outside adjacent to woods. A large sign granted access for Tasmanian Trail users only.
For a little while, we were in a nice forest. Through the trees to our left, we could just make out the farmland, but not so much. When the forest abated on our left, we passed through rolling hills, divided up into several enclosures for cows. A break in the hills gave a good view to Mount Roland, which seemed like a large fin rising out of the distance.
As we neared the end of the farm, the dirt road we followed became a little overgrown. That didn’t last long, though, before we were on the streets of Sheffield.
We passed the campground for the section, located on the outskirts of town near the dog park, and headed to the center of town, planning to get lunch, do our resupply, and return to the campground for the evening.
We found an open bakery, Bossimi’s Bakehouse, and ordered a Hawaiian pizza. It was not one of the better pizzas I had. It was too greasy, barely held itself together, and had so much ham that, even with taking a sizable quantity of ham off, after eating three-quarters of a pizza we should have been able to finish, we couldn’t even contemplate having another bite.
Somehow, I should have known to expect a pizza disaster. The last time I was in a town named Sheffield, on the Appalachian Trail in Massachusetts, I also wound up with too much pizza that eventually became inedible and had to be discarded. Lesson learned: don’t order pizza in towns named Sheffield.
The IGA was two doors down from the cafe, so we separately went to do our resupply, five days to Miena (where we have a box waiting). After we finished repacking, I was feeling a little off, possibly from eating too much ham (if that’s even such a thing?).
The sign for the Sheffield Motor Lodge, peeking over the outside wall at the cafe, beckoned to us, and since it was just a minute walk away, rather than over a kilometer and a half back to the campground, we decided to just stay there. (Once we leave, it’ll be another five days before we have the comforts of staying inside.) A nice shower and some snacks later, I was feeling better.
Tomorrow, we’ll head out for our first long day on the Tasmanian Trail: nearly 30 km to a campground on the Mersey River, which we’ll cross the following morning.