Great Ocean Road

On Saturday, we packed up and headed out in our rental minivan to drive the Great Ocean Road. This road hugs a windy coast between Melbourne and Adelaide, and takes about 15 hours to drive. Given that we had limited time and four girls with us, we decided to only drive the first five hours to Warrnambool, a mid-sized town along the coast. The highlight of this part of our trip was seeing the Twelve Apostles (actually there are only 9 left), which are breathtaking sandstone stacks of various colors towering out of the sea.

The low point of the trip was when Marina "lost her breakfast" due to a bad case of gastroenteritis combined with windy roads. This picture was snapped about an hour after she was cleaned up--poor, exhausted thing!

The foliage is also very unique, and much of this area is a rainforest. During our drive we saw koalas in the wild for the very first time, fulfilling one of Marce's dreams before returning home. Meagan snapped a great picture of an alert koala, shown at left. This is highly unusual, as most koalas sleep or rest about 19 hours a day. And we sighted not just one, but four climbing trees in the same area! Our stay in Warrnambool ended with Thai food take-away and a “dinner theatre” watching "The Princess Bride". Our trip home to Brisbane was uneventful (except that poor Marina was still suffering from the flu bug), and we were glad to be back to our balmy tropical climate. Even Michelle, who was the only one in our family who seemed to thrive on the cold and damp weather, was glad to return to the Brisbane sunshine. It was the first time in almost two years that we had been in such cold weather and Marce and I realize we are becoming weather wimps!
-Marc