The next day, Friday, we headed towards Geelong and the start of the Great Ocean Road. The views along the great ocean road are fantastic and the sea is so blue! We love to watch the waves crashing on the rocks. We stayed the night just outside Lorne, a small touristy destination. A short drive inland from Lorne we walked to Erskine falls, a beautiful 30m waterfall. We also walked to Cora Lynn Casdades, which is even more impressive, partly because of the effort ...

Wednesday we carried on towards the coast, stopping at Ballarat. Ballarat is much the same as Bendigo and other rich mining towns. There are several monuments along the high street one in particular is for the Welcome Stranger. This is the largest gold nugget found in the world, weighing over 69kg! The main highlight in Ballarat is Sovereign Hill, a recreated gold mining town. We both really enjoyed Sovereign Hill. There was lots to do, we watched a blacksmith p...

On Tuesday we visited Castlemaine and Maldon, two small mining towns, Castlemain being the larger. Maldon is quite small compared to Bendigo and Castlemaine as the gold rush there was farily short so did not have as much time to develop. It was obviously a rich town in it's day, which is shown in it's buildings. Castlemaine was much the same as Bendigo only slightly smaller. The main high street is littered with large ornate stone buildings. We stayed the night a...

The next day we had planned to go up Mount Macedon to get a good view of Victoria however we couldn't even see Mount Macedon through all the cloud, so we decided not to bother. Instead we drove to just outside Bendigo and hoped it would be nicer tomorrow. Saturday was a nicer day so we went for a look around Bendigo, the richest gold mining town in Victoria. The gold mining industry lasted over 100 years so it is a well established city. All the buildings are ve...

Our next stop was the Organ Pipes National Park just outside of Melbourne. This is only a small park with some volcanic rock formations, which lolike organ pipes, hence the name.