The Great Ocean Road

Saturday April 15th – Yipee! We have much better weather today, sorry Bay Area folks here I am complaining about one day of rain and I hear you all are about to float away! Anyway, we spent the day driving along the Great Ocean Road and stopping at almost every lookout point (and there are a lot of them!) I’ve added a link to a site for the Great Ocean Road on this blog if you’re interested.

The coast line in this area is famous for its interesting rock formations standing just off the shoreline. The mainland is sheer cliffs made of rock and sandstone and as the waves beat against the cliffs they erode in sometimes interesting ways. The more unusual formations are given names and their own lookout points. We saw The Arch, London Bridge, The 12 Apostles, which is a weird name because there are only about 7 left. The Loch Ard gorge which is where in 1878 the iron clipper, the Loch Ard, miscalculated, crashed against the rock formations and sank killing 52 people. There were only 2 survivors. It was a fascinating day.

Further along the road we turned off and went to the Otway Fly Treetop walk. “The Fly” is a 600 metre long 25 metre high elevated tree top walk which goes through a magnificent stand of cool temperate rainforest featuring Myrtle Beech, Blackwood and Mountain Ash. It’s a little scary all the way at the top but the view is well worth it. It reminded me of Muir Woods, the trees aren't as tall as the giant redwoods but they're pretty close.

From there we went on to Geelong were we found a hotel at the last minute. Geelong looks promising although we didn’t get much time to explore once we checked in, found somewhere to eat and located the internet café. Hopefully we can explore a bit tomorrow, but I’m thinking most places will be closed as it is Easter Sunday. Guess we’ll find out.