Yeah, yeah, yeah, its been a while, I know you've all just been sooo hanging out for the next installment! Since the last update, we've crossed the border into Victoria, stayed in Melbourne for 6 nights, and are now in Echuca. Victoria is cold. We heard on the radio that its been the coldest May on record, how awesome is that? Pfffft!! So, to continue the monologue......
DAY 15 (9th May): We'd camped over night at Portland, and in the morning packed up and drove out to Cape Bridgewater to check out the Petrified Forest, which, upon further reading of the handily placed information boards, we found was NOT actually a forest, rather the result of some fairly scientific process, similar to what happens in caves. Too much thinking, lets look at the pictures.....
The "forest".
Some coastline. Included just so I can look and remind myself of blue-sky times :)
They had a large scale windfarm there too. This was probably only about a third of the windmills.
This was the Portland pub. Three stories. They must do a bit of drinking in Portland!
After Portland and Cape Bridgewater, we continued on to Warrnambool, stopping for lunch in Port Fairy.
This is Port Fairy...... I didn't find out how THIS place got its name either......!
Our caravan park had an indoor swimming pool, to the delight of the kids. Not so much to the delight of PB.....
I'm in trouble for that. He's threatening to make his own blog now.......
DAY 16 (10th May): The Maritime Museum - Flagstaff Hill - at Warrnambool is fabulous, with a recreated village to walk around. The kids get a "treasure hunt" booklet to do, which was great.
The main street....
The closest these kids are getting to school for a while! :)
So close, and yet, so far.......
Cap'n M!
Hello! from the top deck of the passenger ferry.... Everything was so well restored...
The Loch Ard Peacock - rescued from a shipwreck from which only two people survived.
After leaving Warrnambool, we continued Eastwards along the Great Ocean Road, with many stops to check out the amazing scenery. Well, I checked much of it out, the others stayed in the car while I went and snapped away at some of them! It
was a bit of a miserable day....
London Bridge - or what's left. Used to be two arches.
The Arch. And M doing some weird thing with his hands.
Us at the Twelve Apostles.
Obviously, polite subtlety wasn't working....... The funny thing was that someone had stuck those plastic googly eyes on all of the signs.....
The Twelve Apostles. It's such striking scenery.
We chose to camp at a very small town just east of the 12 Ap's called Princetown. Initially, it seemed a lovely place.
Our site with a view..... how's the serenity? But.... it was the most AWFUL night - this was our first introduction to true Victorian weather, I think! We could SEE the bands of cloud - some rain bearing - ripping across the sky. This should have been a warning. It blew a gale all night, rained and hailed - we had to put the tent down a bit so the water wouldn't pool on the roof, which meant that the canvas whipped and snapped against the frame all night. I was sure we were going to blow away over the south coast! The only plus was, it was so windy, that the winds blew the tent dry. So, after a mostly sleepless night - except J, she slept through the whole thing - we moved to...
DAY 17 - (11th May): where we decided to fast track our arrival to Melbourne. So a quick visit to the Ottway Fly, which is a tree-top walk, where the tops of the trees are just a wee bit higher than our WA ones! Supposedly the longest and highest one of its type in the world. They had a "Dinosaur walk" on the way as well:
RRRAAAAWWWWWRRRRRR!!
You see the look in its eye? Its saying "It wasn't ME!"
Walking in the trees....
The tower - very high. Too much for child #1
Me and child #1 safely on the lower layer.
Child #2 at the top - Little Miss No Fear!
A very tall tree stump that people have thrown coins onto. Its about 3m off the walkway, Pete had 5 goes at it..... lets just say that there's a few little money trees going to be sprouting down below!
A very wide tree....
Looking up.....
After the Otways, we pretty much hotfooted it in the general direction of Melbourne. Stopped in Geelong, cos I'd heard that the bollards were pretty cool. Pete wasn't so impressed when I directed him down what turned out to pretty much be a driveway and he couldn't turn around without unhitching the trailer - my bad....
They were pretty cool though...... :)
Then onto civilization at my Aunt and Uncle's place - with Melbourne turning on the weather for us on the drive!
Yup, that's hail in between the lanes.....
Ok, I'll leave it there. This is all getting away from me! Will hopefully cover the Melbourne adventure soon, although we were quite laid back and didn't do much stuff.
As always, hope you're all well!
K, P, M + J
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