Day 21 - Apollo Bay to Lorne

Today after breakfast we explored a little around Apollo Bay. As the name suggests, the town of Apollo Bay is right on the coastline overlooking the bay, which is a beautiful semi-circular / wineglass bay.

We first spotted an Op-shop so Mim simply HAD to have a quick poke around but didn’t find any treasures this time (probably couldn’t fit any more in the caravan at this stage anyway!) Then onto the information centre to find out what to do in the area if anything was of interest and then back to the supermarket and have some lunch in the nearby park.






I (Greg) had been trying (unsuccessfully!) to get another bank account opened up online in the past couple of weeks, and stumbled across a CBA branch in town, so I headed in there to sort that out, while Mim and the kids did some shopping for lunch. While Mim and Bek did lunch, I did some business work and the kids played chasey on the play ground and other fun things.

While having our lunch some very curious magpies came over to investigate the nice smell and Bek got them to eat out of her hand.

After lunch we made our way along the windy part of the Great Ocean Road. The stretch running between Apollo Bay and Lorne is the 'classic' stretch of the Great Ocean Road often used in commercial footage advertising cars, motorbikes and a host of other things vaguely connected with the road or the ocean! It's a bit hard to give the idea of how windey in photos but some of the views were pretty beautiful!

Along the way we stopped at Carisbrook Falls. We'd heard this had a nice lookout, and it was still big and interesting enough, although you were unable to get anywhere near the falls themselves as you can see, and the water itself ran down the rocky side of a hill rather than cascading over a precipice.

However what we missed on the falls (if you can call it a miss, it was still interesting enough), we made up for on the general surrounds of the area. The river the falls run into ran quite close to the entrance, and this provided plenty of opportunities to explore and pick blackberries. Unlike Adelaide, this part of Victoria is abundant in blackberries, and so long as you don't mind taking a chance on some thorns there are plenty of juicy fruits ready for the picking!

We also had our first encounter with leeches (yuk!), fortunately not on the skin but Bek and Matt had a couple that decided to attach themselves to their clothing.

We stopped for afternoon tea further along the road at Kennett River. As the name suggests, this is like Carisbrook Falls, and indeed lots of other places along this stretch of coast, where one of the many rivers which make their way down the various mountains in Great Otway National Park make their way out to the ocean. Kennett River has a small township attached to it, although we stopped by the ocean rather than in the town.

The kids, seeing a river, and NOT seeing the Antarctic-like conditions likely to prevail, were taken by the urge to put the canoe in and continue their smugglers game they'd started in Warrnambool! We happily obliged after Jude suggested we have a hot cup of Jarrah (a delicious brand of various coffee / chocolate / milk powder blends if you've not heard of it).

This shot looked too good to miss, even not particularly being a Mitsubishi fan!

From there we made our way along the Great Ocean Road to Lorne. We headed for a free camp we'd found but even though it was a long way along a pretty bumpy track it was already completely full. Not in a sense that surprising since it was after 6pm - free camps you're best to get there by mid-afternoon if you want some choice of spot. So after a bit of driving around we poked ourselves into a spot we hoped no-one would mind (no-one did) and stopped for the night. There was a tense moment when someone drove past but no-one bothered us, and we made sure, as always, we left no traces of our visit.

Mim did up a delicious dinner on one of the gas BBQ's so we didn't have to set our cooking gear up, and we were watched the whole time by a quite tame but decent sized grey kangaroo!

-- Greg