Great Ocean Road Trip 2014

Day 4

Port Campbell - London Bridge - Peterborough - Bay of Islands - Childers Cove - Warrnambool

Today was somewhat cruiser than yesterday. We awoke to beautiful sunny skies for a change this trip and so we wanted to make the most of the day. We quickly packed and were on the road before 9am.

The wind had picked up overnight and was fairly brisk as we left Port Campbell. We stopped in at London Bridge again this morning and you could see how the wind had affected things. The swell was much larger than last night and was quite powerful against the limestone cliffs and towers.

Our best laid plans of getting onto the beach at London Bridge were thwarted though! Seems that a colony of fairy penguins have decided to make the base of the cliff their nests and so the stairs were removed and no access to the beach is now possible. We had to be content with what was the top of the stairs as another lookout over lots of little penguin prints in the sand.

We travelled on and did a drive by of Peterborough. Just like Princetown, sneeze and you miss the town. One pub and a general store next door to each other and that's it. They have a couple of beaches that were pretty rocky and rough in the swell we drove by as well.

Travelling today was noted as either being beautiful sandy beaches with tall rocky limestone outcrops or farmers bailing rolls and rolls of hay. The landscape is dotted everywhere with paddocks full of freshly rolled hay bales.

We drove on and stopped at the Bay of Islands which is a beautiful bay with scattered pillars and rock outcrops, rock plateaus and caves etched into the base of the rocks by the unrelenting sea. It would be a great place to go snorkelling and there is even a boat ramp access.

Onward we travelled and we decided to take a turn off the main road and deviate out to Childers Bay. It looked like a nice spot on the map and it was the bay in which the ship Children was wrecked in 1839. The road was single lane only -which is always fun towing- but the scenery was beautiful. The contrasting dry yellow colours of the fields mixed with deeper greens of the trees and the cloudless blue sky.

There are a couple of bays here to explore. Childers itself was 87 steps to the beach and surrounded on 3 sides by tall cliffs ending on the sand. On one side there had been a recent rock slide too. High tide here washes right up to the cliffs! It would be a great place to camp here too -if it were allowable.

We left Childers and decided that just like yesterday we'd drop the Van off to make the most of exploring Warrnambool. It was only a 78k drive today and so we arrived just after 11am and were lucky our site was vacant.
We had lunch quickly and headed just next door to Flagstaff Hill which is a very well run historic township basically. It has so many features - from telling the story of the shipwreck coast here, to displaying artifacts salvaged from the wrecks to telling the history of the town from garrisons fearing Russian invasion and of stores and trades of past years. It was a fascinating place. The kids wrote themselves and cashed out a £1 cheque from the Bank of Australiasia.

We left Flagstaff and headed out to the breakwall protecting the harbour and walked along the beach at Stingray Bay. The water temperature is much warmer than the windchill that we faced all day! Even Cobey agreed!!

From there it was onto Logan's Beach where they have set up a whale watching platform. Not in season for whales but it's quite a good setup for when they migrate here. The homes surrounding the beach are quite spectacular too.

After a shop and fuel it was to be an early night for us - however there is an amusement park set up temporarily right next to the park blaring music for the rides which wasn't what we had planned on.

Tomorrow we will head to Port Fairy before turning inland for our return trip slowly home.