Cockington Greene

So, Operation Publish the Last Posts on Tasmania in as Short a Time as Possible can be declared a failure. Blogging on weekdays is apparently not our forte. With a nod towards that, I thought we would take a small detour from Tasmania and show you something else.

Gold Creek is a cute little area full of specialty shops, restaurants, tea houses, museums, and gardens. Tucked away in the back is the Cockington Greene Gardens, which is made up of miniture models of houses and life in the English villiage and countryside. Most of the buildings are no taller than a foot and a half so you get to feel a bit like Gulliver. We're giants! Below is the electric train makings its rounds.

Whoever came up with the idea for the Gardens really had a fun time putting it together. Look! Its Stonehenge!

This picture is of the hedge maze from a raised platform overlooking the Garden. You are supposed to use your eye and try and look your way through it. It's absolutely impossible. Not because the maze is particularly well designed (it might be), but because there is no way I could keep my eye along one individual path. It got confused pretty quickly. Still kind of cool though, and I would love to walk through a real one of these someday.

At one end of the gardens is the "International Section." Over there is where small models of national treasures and important buildings have been built from all over the world, each one sponosered and donated by the local embassies. There are about 30 of them in all, from all over the world. Sadly, the States have apparently not chosen to sponsor a model yet. I was hoping for a mini Mount Rushmore or Washington Monument. Here is Petra in Jordan.

And here is a little shout-out to Adam and Rachel in Korea. We miss you guys!

Now this was phenomenal. Its a Buddhist temple on the island of Java in Indonesia. The real temple is made out of molten lava rock from a volcano eruption.  Sounds incredible.  This picture doesn't really do it justice, but the level of detail is just amazing. We'd never really thought about going to Indoensia while we are here, but now we are giving it some serious thought. We'd love to see the real thing. Add one more place to the list . . .

Here is Tenochticlan in Mexico. It occured to us that this is actually a really good place for travel research, since these are the sites that the country itself has chosen to showcase. We took a bunch of pictures of the signs explaining each model to remind us of all the super-cool places we need to go to around the world.

Lastly, this is a castle, I believe, in Croatia. We thought it was especially pretty with the way they had used the plants as well. Actually, a disproportionate number of the models came from Eastern Europe. Not sure why that is unless those countries saw this as a relatively cheap way of advertising the local tourism. Regardless, it was a lot of fun, and actually a lot cooler than we thought it was going to be.