G'day from Adelaide!

The last few days we have driven along the Great Ocean Road from Melbourne, driven up to Grampians National Park and then through to Adelaide. That's almost 2000km we have driven in the past week!

We left Melbourne around 9am and started with a tiring drive on a 50km limit 4-lane motorway. That was after I got used to the automatic car with super-humanly powerful brakes. After a few neck jolts and accidental horn bashes, we finally arrived at the Great Ocean Road and stopped off at Bells Beach to watch the hoards of surfers. We stopped at Anglesea for a coffee to keep the driver awake, but also got enticed by a slice of pizza each. We kept stopping at pretty much every lookout point at the side of the road. We had a snack and coffee at Apollo Bay, arriving at the Twelve Apostles after 3pm. I drove straight past Loch and Gorge - which Lisa wanted to see - so had to head back on ourselves from Port Campbell, but it was nice and worth it as Lisa loves the beach there! We liked the Bay of Martyrs and Bay of Islands, which we passed around sunset, and we arrived at our hostel in Port Fairy at about 6:30pm. We had a mahousive fish and chips and got another early night.

We left Port Fairy and headed for Tower Hill Wildlife Sanctuary, where we came across about 20 kangaroos in the car park - there was also an emu with 3 baby emus! We then saw 2 koalas, a few more emus and loads of kangaroos, before driving up the road to Logan's Beach (a whale viewing area) where we saw quite a few whales really close to the shore. We quickly stopped off at McDonalds and the supermarket before starting our journey up to the Grampians and arrived at Halls Gap for lunch. We fought big birds (and one small brave/evil one) for our lunch and thankfully won. We didn't think much of the Grampians National Park really - we kept driving and walking for kilometre after kilometre (Australia is forcing us to go metric) to come across nice yet quite disappointing sights as the visibility was poor. We stopped at a nice YHA in Halls Gap where I thrashed Lisa at Monopoly and then we started the really long journey to Adelaide early this morning.

We drove for about 7 hours/550km. We arrived earlier than expected so stopped off at a few wineries in the Adelaide Hills before going to the city and having a Chinese. Going to explore tomorrow.

Paul