After a long but nice ferry trip (9hrs) from Port Melbourne, quick pizza dinner and another 3hrs or so drive from Devonport, we arrived in Hobart late last night (Hobart is located on the Southern coast of Tasmania). For some reason pretty much all accomodation was booked out for that one night, but one of our group found an apartment earlier with extra rooms so we even had space to put up additional linux.conf.au travellers we met on the ferry. The conference accomodation for most of us only starts on the Sunday.

It’s nice to be back in Hobart and Tasmania in general. There’s even more fresh air here (like New Zealand) and space and lots of nature (as long as bloody Gunns doesn’t chop it all down to feed its stupid papermills). Last time here was several years ago when I was invited by the Tasmanian government to give the opening keynote at a Tasmanian Open Source Forum. That visit I also spoke at the local Linux user group (the good gang that is now organising this year’s LCA) and travelled to Launcheston to chat with local TAFE students and a teacher who were using MySQL in their web/db course.

Tas was most enjoyable that time and I’ve always wanted to come back. I won’t have time for a big look around in the coming week, but I do intend to spend a proper holiday here some time fairly soon (perhaps with Phoebe). But first now, we need to find a good breakfast!