The Great Ocean Road

THE GREAT OCEAN ROAD

After we left Melbourne, we headed south than east to the Great Ocean Road. We were really looking forward to this part of the trip as we had heard so much about this area. The Great Ocean Road hugs the coastline, winding around excellent surf beaches (which Bell's Beach was my favorite...I wonder why?), past rugged cliffs, limestone formations, rainforests, waterfalls and holiday towns. We camped 4 nights along this breathtaking course.

The most famous attraction along the road is the 12 Apostles. They are limestones formations more than 70 meters high. They use to be part of the mainland but nature has done its damage. There are only 10 Apostles left due to rain, wind and tide. Two apostles have fallen. I wonder what their vices were??? As you can see by the pictures we had wonderful weather. We had zero days of rain and only 2 cool/cloudy ones out of 16 total days. A bit drier than our NZ trip.

We also went into the Otway Range Rainforest. We did a hike on the Otway Fly Tree Top Walk. This is a 600 meter long steel walkway, 25 meters (80-85 feet) above the forest ground. It gave us a bird eye's view of the gum trees and the rest of the rainforest flora. The structure was designed to sway like the trees in the wind.

It was our first time camping in Australia. We used 2 three-man tents. The kids slept in one and Mike and I used the other. To be honest, I was nervous to camp. There are so many "nasties" here that I thought something would crawl into our tent or we would wake up to a huge spiderweb around the door to our tent. It all ended up being just fine...at least for this trip.

We headed next to the gold fields and mountains. Kyle and Mariah will handle those topics...