TravellingStrom

I woke up a tad crook this morning, it must have been the rum again. Anyway, another cool day ahead of us, so off we went but saw Mark and Sam’s bike outside, they must be sleeping in 🙂

The first section of road was through the forest area across the Cape Otway peninsular, this is a tight set of twistys with a lot of overhead coverage from trees. The roads are mostly OK, but watch out for a section that had all these roadwork’s signs, slow down, prepare to stop etc and no one there, but the road is shit! Have a look yourself!

We carried on slowly down to Glenaire , up through Lavers Hill then Princetown, this is where the real action begins as far as scenery, as just down the road a ways are the 12 Apostles, these are things I have heard about and seen photos of, but in real life they are great, check these out 🙂

These were great but onwards to the Loch Ard Gorge. As we were leaving I spotted a tar road crew and asked themabout the bad twisty road up the forest way, they said that section was done by contractors and nothing to do with mainroads,sounds a bit suss to me. Anyway there was heaps to do here and looking at the walks it was going to take hours. As it was already gone midday and we were a tad peckish, we decided to check out the blowhole, this is a long tunnel formed under the cliff which has then broken through. After a ship wreck 11 bodies were found washed up inside here.

Can you imagine getting shipwrecked along this coast, surviving the wreck then having to negotiate with these cliffs to get out of the water, the waves were ferocious along this part of the coast.

We were hungry, so we went on to Port Campbell and had a feed. This is also where I found my Mastercard folded in my wallet and thought it was buggered, so I checked at the CBA and it tested fine. I could have ordered another one, but had no idea where to send it to 😦 We could have gone back to the Gorge, but as it was after 1pm we decided to continue on, the next stop was The Arch. If you look at the way the sea was running, you can understand how these cliffs are just wearing away, and today was relatively small swells!

Just down the road we stopped at a place called London Bridge, this has had one span collapse recently, geographically speaking. Before that though I spotted this crazy looking bug, a sort of caterpillar which had sticks glued to its back, weird 🙂

Just go up the road a bit and you get to the grotto, this is really nice, and just a short walk off the carpark. It was becoming a chore though, helmet, gloves off/on/off/on 😉

OK, gear on again and down the road a short way to the Bay of Islands, another place that has similar wear patterns like the Apostles. This is an awesome place 🙂

We had pretty much come to the end of the road as far as all the scenery was concerned. I know I was tired by now and it was 3pm, so it was start looking for a place to stay. We figured Warrnambool might be OK, so we went there and checked out the visitor centre. There was a choice of caravan parks and I wanted to camp rather than motel it. The weather had cleared a bit, the wind was up but if we could find a sheltered camp site it would be worthwhile. After a bit of dithering around we decided to go on to Port Fairy and we eventually got settled in a park, only a short walk from town. After setting up camp we did the obvious and headed to town for a beer and a feed this time! We reversed last night’s decision and just went into the first pub we came to, it was a bit quiet, but OK I guess.

After a few beers we decided to try the next pub where we had been told was good cheap food. The first thing we noticed was it had a fire, which was great and we met some great people. Apparently, Port Fairy was nothing to do with Fairy Penguins, they are at Phillip Island, Port Fairy was originally called Belfast, but was changed a long time ago. Anyway, once again the people’s names are missing because it was on the same notepad sheet as the other ones, geez I hate that 😦 Come on Greg, do you have them written down somewhere? The evening progressed similar as the night before, we were asked if we would be interested in dinner as it closed at 8pm, that was a great thought by the bar manager Alicia. *Edit, thanks Greg. First up is Vicki and Shaun, then Alicia with Greg and myself in there as well. The next pub a couple of locals, the oldish barman called John, then Greg with Michelle and Alicia, a different one.*

We eventually got kicked out of there and headed back to the other pub which was now rocking and stayed a bit late again 🙂

Then of course we had to walk back in the freezing cold and crash out.

Day – 208km
Trip – 22,131km

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