 | Great Ocean RoadCliffs Notes Version:The Great Ocean Road is a very scenic portion of the drive between Melbourne and Adelaide. Most of the stops are insanely picturesque, with the most famous site being the "12 Apostles." We spent the night along the way and then arrived in Adelaide. |
Day 1Colleen had one of those day-by-day calendars last year of 1000 places to see before you die (wait, how did that work with only 365 days). Anyway, one of the entries, a Tuesday if I recall, was the Great Ocean Road. It's this couple hundred kilometer stretch between Melbourne and Adelaide that had some pretty crazy scenery. If you have a spare week, I recommend you check out the Snapfish photos of the trip, especially the ones for the Great Ocean Road. Look for a series of about 200 pictures with lots of blue. My descriptions really wouldn't do the scenery much justice.Anyway, to do the road we first needed to get a car. This meant driving on the wrong side of the road. I had got used to the toilet water going the opposite way so I was pretty sure I could also adjust to driving on the left. We got the car (in the middle of downtown Melbourne) and driving on the left wasn't too bad ... until I had to turn. Those madmen switched up the windshield wipers and the turn signals on me. Every time it started raining I turned right and every time I wanted to turn, the wipers would go on. This seriously took me a couple days to get used to. Oh, everything is in kilometers too so driving 100 is totally legit down there. Once we got on the road we hit up most of the scenic points along the way, check the pics for more details. One of the beaches had this little cove that I told Colleen to stand in and pretend she was Atlas and act like she was holding the above rock up. She got over there and got attacked by about 1000 flies and tripped over her purse in front of a local. I think we made her day. We aim to please. At the end of the day we went and saw the "12 Apostles," a group of rock formations that's claim to fame is their photographic presence in almost every inspirational calendar you can buy.
We ended up spending the night in a little town on the road. A couple things of note about this town. When we checked in to our hotel, they handed us a pint of milk. No explanation, just handed it to us with our key and sent us on our way. There is another thing we noticed about this town, and for that matter Australia in general. They are about 20 years behind us in pop culture which is why we were not at all surprised when we heard New Kids on the Block come on the radio in the local grocery store. Now, this wasn't "Hangin' Tough" or "The Right Stuff," this was obscure New Kids on the Block ... it may have even been from the infamous NKOTB stage of their career. After dinner, we went back to our hotel and thought about drinking our milk but decided we wanted to live so went to sleep without it. Day 2
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