Our home-away-from-home for three glorious days/nights was Curringa Farms, a sheep farm in the South of Tasmania. Curringa Farm came highly recommended to us by a fellow NYC family traveling the world with their kiddos (thank you, Sullivans!!). We worked a Curringa stay into our itinerary, and are so grateful we did!
Curringa has 10 individual cabins, scattered about their massive 300 hectare property (750 acres). We booked ourselves into Boobook, named for an Australia owl by the same name. Hard as we tried, we didn’t see any boobooks during our stay. Our Boobook cabin had 2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms (a luxury!), a full kitchen, washing machine (yay!) and virtually floor-to-ceiling windows across the back of the unit that treated us to sweeping views of the rural landscape & sheep 24/7.
All four of us unanimously agreed that Curringa is one of our top 3 favorite accommodation spots of our travels! It hit the mark in so many ways:
Raw Beauty
Curringa is natural beauty at its best. There’s no fancy landscaping or pretenses; just wide open expanses of gorgeous natural land with gum & eucalyptus trees and animals galore (more on that later).
The beauty isn’t maybe obvious straight away; it’s not lush green grass and vibrant colored flowers. But we’ve come to realize in our travels just how much we enjoy remote, raw environments like these, largely untouched by development or cosmetic altering. It was the same in Faroe Islands & the Austrian countryside, and even pockets of Southeast Asia. When that kind of beauty is at your doorstep, you can’t help but get out & explore.
Doug & I went for runs each day. For Doug that’s not out of the norm; he’s really disciplined about getting out to run virtually everywhere we go. I’m less consistent in my workouts, and change it up more often. Sometimes I run, other times I do a workout video downloaded from YouTube, other times I run stairs in a high rise building!; really just depends on where we are. For running in particular, I’m most motivated to run when there’s natural beauty within reach. Curringa delivers that in spades, to the point where I’d actually physically feel an urge to get out and run. It was amazing. Sadie even joined in on the running action! She & Doug went out for a run together! Check out Sadie's very own blog post about the run here!
After dinner in the evenings we’d linger outside. Sometimes with a tennis ball, playing catch; other times just walking around and watching stampedes of sheep. It was always magical. And as weird as this sounds, it felt good/right/satisfying to be present in that moment together, with nowhere to be, no bedtime to make. The setting demanded we take notice & enjoy its beauty together.
Abundant Wildlife
We knew there’d be sheep (3000+ on the Curringa property!); that we had no doubt of! No matter what time of day we would see dozens upon dozens of sheep out our windows. And if we ventured a bit further on foot, we could see hundreds without squinting a bit. Early morning and dusk where the times the sheep would come closest to the house to nibble on grass. Curringa also had three resident Scottish Highland cows, one horse (Honey), three alpacas and three sheepdogs. All of them were gorgeous.
We were amazed by how many wallabies we saw!! Prior to arriving at Curringa, we had no clue what a wallaby was. Apparently kangaroos are not native to Tasmania; only to mainland Australia. Wallabies, on the other hand, are native to Tasmania and are similar to kangaroos, but smaller in size. At first we noticed a few wallabies off in the distance from our back deck. Then one hopped by Doug on a run! Best of all were the dozen or so we saw - just feet away - while on a dusk bush walk down the road from our cabin.
We even scored big time and had several echidna sightings! Another animal we’d never heard of until arriving on Australian soil! We first got introduced to echidnas in Sydney when Sadie asked Ben what his favorite animal was. When he answered echidna, we needed more information :) We first saw some at Bonorong Wildlife Sanctuary (including an amputee echidna named Russell), and then had several sightings not far from our cabin in Curringa. Their long snout + mouse-like face + hedgehog-like quills make for a darn cute critter!
There were gazillions of birds on the farm. Gorgeous white & yellow cockatoos flooded the skies & trees, especially down by the nearby lake shores. Magpies all over. Laughing kookaburras several times a day (the best!). And countless others that we couldn’t even name. The audio visual show of the birds was awesome.
Having animals like these literally at our doorstep was magical. It added to the beauty of the place and our experience, making every step off our deck an adventure in who/what we would see.
Homecooked Meals
We’ve come off 68 days in Southeast Asia, which is the same amount of time we’ve been without a kitchen for cooking. Restaurant fatigue is real! Eating out 3 meals a day is tiring (not to mention a drain on the wallet, when you're not in SE Asia). We're thrilled to have access to a kitchen again and cook meals ourselves! We snagged a few dry spices & coarse salt in Bali, in anticipation of our return to cooking in Australia. We stocked up on groceries on our drive into Curringa, so we were ready to hit the ground running. Curringa kindly provided essentials for our first morning’s breakfast (milk, eggs, fresh bread, muesli, coffee & tea).
Even before our travels, we were really good about carving out time for family meals. If you ask Sadie, they're one of her very favorite things :) On the road, it feels different and more like dinners at home, when we can gather around a table with our own home-cooked meals & share our high/low points of the day (as opposed to out at a restaurant). It's nice to have that routine back.
School with a View
School has been in full session at Curringa. The cabins themselves don't have WiFi. We knew that when we had booked months ago, but had completely forgotten until we arrived. That meant we'd head back up to the main reception building about 3km away . . . a beautiful, open space looking out onto a field & small lake. School with a stellar view :)
The field doubled as a quick "recess" break to refocus the mind & body (aka run to the pond & back!). Quick breaks were also permitted to pet the friendly sheepdogs who wandered over :)
So there you have it . . . A sense of why the four of us unanimously agree that Curringa Farm is one of our top 3 favorite accommodation spots of our travels! This post isn't exhaustive, and it isn't able to capture the sounds, smells and overall amazing *feel* of being at Curringa, but its scratches the surface of why Curringa is an all time favorite "happy place" for the Global Subway :)
p.s. Two other things that were better with a Curringa view . . . laundry and postcard writing!
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