in the merry old land of aus: great ocean road trip, day one

As our main trip on this mom-em-sara vacation, we decided to go on a road trip from Adelaide down Great Ocean Road to the Melbourne Avalon Airport. We rented our Nissan Tiide from Adelaide City and started driving at 10:00am on Tuesday, May 26, 2011 with only a few main destinations in mind. This was a fairly spontaneous and wing-it trip for us and we loved it! Driving through the Adelaide Hills was beautiful; there was an endless landscape of vineyards and farmland, and of forest and scrubland.

First, we decided to go to Victor Harbour and Granite Island because of a short documentary I saw about it on a television. I knew that there was a horse tram that takes you across onto Granite Island form Victor Harbour. What I didn’t know in advance was that we were going to ride camels there, that we were going to see penguins there, and just how nice the sun, water, and rocks would look together for us. We walked along the beach on the mainland and then saw the camels. We had previously decided that instead of doing our camel ride in the Flinders Ranges we would drive Great Ocean Road, so when we saw the camels, we knew we were lucky and just had to ride them along the sand and took full advantage of this! A little fun fact.. camels have similar legs and knees to cows, so when they stand, their back legs are up first and you feel as if you are going to slide right down the front of them. It takes a minute for them, but when they stand with their front legs it is one at a time and quite jerky. This is when I started to feel a little sorry for having to have our extra weight on them while standing, but they will apparently not move to let their trainer know when they are too tired for us humans. Granite Island was beautiful and gave us some stunning views of the harbour. We walked a trail that goes around the island for about an hour. On our walk we saw penguins and plenty of birds, and could here things in the bushes but didn’t really feel like exploring them. We saw cool rock formations like the Umbrella Rock and Chair Rock.

After this stop we decided to drive for a little while, stopping at places on the side of the road with no names or signs to take some pictures and stretch our legs. We made it to Meningie for dinner and the sun set and drove a little longer until we reached the next city along our path which ended up being Robe.