Day 24: Getalong to Geelong

We left Port Campbell this morning and started back along the main coast road. We had originally planned to complete the loop inland, but much of the ocean road goes inland anyway, so we thought it would be nicer to revisit a few places and catch any of the lookout points that we missed on the way up.

We did see some really great rock formations that we missed earlier: it was like living through a real life A-level geography lesson, all that was missing was Mr Quilter's descriptions of 'peter the pebble'.

This was the Saturday of the long weekend, so there were lots more people out and about than there had been on Thursday, and this lent quite a different air to a lot of the locations.

It was also nice from a 'smug points' point of view to be travelling in the opposite direction to the majority of traffic!

We stopped off in a town at the end/start of the ocean road, called Torquay, which felt a bit odd. It's meant to be a very lively, action-packed town that is seething with surfers. Not so much off-season. In fact mid-way through lunch, where we were huddled in doors in our jackets, Dan got the owner to close the door. About 2 minutes later, the heavens opened and it absolutely whammed it down for the rest of the day.

We also stopped off in a place called Geelong (no idea still if that's a hard or soft G at the beginning) where we again parked up and got very wet and very cold. This far south at this time of year, it's not quite the Australia one imagines.

We unfortunately mis-timed it so that we didn't get to explore the Wool Museum. Sorry, just checking my notes: The National Wool Museum. Not just any wool musuem you see, but the one for the entire country. And it's a big country. With a lot of sheep. I imagine it could have taught the Falmouth National Maritime Museum a thing or too.


Finally we left the delights of Wool behind, and headed to our final stop in Melbourne: the Holiday Inn at the Airport. This was particuarly handy as we had arranged for the car to go back to the airport and we had an early morning check in.

We had dinner in the bar, and I managed to score some ear plugs for reception in the hope that Dan might be able to get a proper night's sleep even with my incessant snoring. Sorry Dan!

Tomorrow: The Gold Coast and a real change of climate.