Great Ocean Road Trip 2010

As is possibly evident, internet was difficult to come by on the trip - and I wasn't prepared to pay mobile roaming data rates to keep it up to date.

In summary, the trip was great. Here's some of the better snaps for all you loyal followers...

Penola:

Unfortunate weather on along the coast:


Lighthouses and beachy stuff:

A photo walk around Melbourne:
Forresty stuff
Some sights around our accommodation in Halls Gap:

Adelaide to Penola

I had a cracking start to the day with a McDonald's Bacon & Egg McMuffin, Deb ate at home, but enjoyed a McDonald's Iced Coffee which hit the spot.

We got to Crafers to rendezvous with Andrew and Kelly at around 8:30am and we were on the road by 9am - first stop, Keith.

Not much interesting in Keith, I had (a very average) Long Black, but the chocolate donut Deb and I shared was tasty!

We drove on through to Naracoorte. On the way, we were overtaken by a guy in a Rav4 doing easily 125Km/h. Andrew and I were both sitting on 110Km/h, and this guy hooned past like we were fools. Well, what do you know, the joke was on him. 10 minutes later we drove past him... he was having a conversation with a police patrol. How sweet life can be sometimes!




Onwards from Naracoorte, to Penola. We checked into our great accomodation for a bit of downtime.









We then hit the Coonawarra wine region for some tasting at about 3:30pm. We managed to get through

* Balnaves
* Bowen
* Majella
* Zema
* Wynns









But then 5pm arrived.

Day 20 – Goodbye NZ

And so we say goodbye to our home for the past three weeks we have decided to extend the common reference to the “land of the long white cloud” to include:
... the land of the hitch-hikers, the one-way bridges, the stalkers, the super fine merino clothing, dump stations and stock effluent stations, winding roads and national parks, take-aways, Montieth & Speights Breweries, Juicy & Spaceship budget rental vans, braided rivers and beautiful mountain peaks.

We have done pretty well, having travelled 3600km and 12 different modes of transpor on our journeyt;
- Plane
- Bus/Coach
- Motorhome
- Ferry/Catamaran
- Tram
- Punt
- Car/4WD/Van
- Helicopter
- Jet Boat
- Segway
- Gondola
- Train

It has been an excellent holiday and we have certainly seen the sights. I’m sure there’s much more we could do and see, but for now this is enough.
All we had to do in NZ this morning was get breakfast and get to the airport. We did both of these with ease.

Last night we scoped out a good place for breakfast just up the road, so we headed there when it opened at 9am. We were done and back at the motel by 9.30 and escorted to the airport. We had a furry traveller on this journey with us – the owners four-month old Jack Russell called Scooby.

We checked in (nobody told us we had to pay to leave the country - $25 each!) and made our way through security – my backpack was worked over because he thought he saw something on the x-ray. It just had to be in the bag that I had all the souvenirs in, so there was paperbag after paperbag to go through. It turned out it looked like a blade right next to Guy’s bottle opener but it was the magnet on the back of it.

With that ordeal out of the way, we then wound our way through duty free shopping. Guy didn’t take long to pick out the four scotches he was going to buy with his and my allowed quota. I, however, needed some more time to suss out the makeup area so he took a seat while I did this. Then I perused one of the clothing shops, and then I was ready to go into the Qantas lounge.

Guy wasn’t expecting much from this lounge but to our surprise it was lovely and had awesome food. We tucked into some mini sausage rolls and savoury scrolls (with mashed potato in the middle...yum!) and pizza.





I remembered I had some NZ dollars left that I HAD to spend so I ventured back out, came back, went out again...came back....you get the picture. I was all finished with about 20 mins to spare before boarding so I had a lovely L&P – the last for the trip – and Guy poured himself a G&T (this is after his wine and beer).

The flight was pretty full and it was a crappy plane that didn’t have ‘on demand’ movies – I was devastated. Because of this the flight felt like a long time, but we had the seats behind Business again so it was quite roomy.

As soon as we were off this flight we were go, go, go..... I forget Guy is a seasoned traveller so he doesn’t want to hang around for just one more look at duty free. It paid off as every queue was short.

To Guy’s disgust, we did however have to go through the ‘declared’ line in Customs. This was for a few reasons; I had some left over snacks, we bought a wooden ornament and we’d been on farm land, etc. When we got to the x-ray machine I had to pull out the popcorn and it was taken away. She wasn’t even interested in the wood ornament. From our Border Security watching days we thought for sure that the wood would be a problem.
So we are now through all that and have transferred to the Domestic Terminal where we are waiting in the Business Class lounge for our next flight. Mmm.....warm scones.....