Day 21 – Cape Otway to Wye River

Tonight was a much quieter night all round.  The bit of rain probably helped.  This morning is cold, but the sun is poking though at times.

In the morning light we get a few more photos of our furry friend,  he hasn’t seemed to have moved much.   While I had the camera out I managed to get a shot of one of those small birds with the blue features.   They move around so quickly it’s hard to catch them

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We drive out via 4km of very narrow dirt road, fortunately we don’t come across any oncoming traffic.   Across the same roads as we did yesterday to Apollo Bay, at least this time we don’t bother with Cape Otway.

Into town and we pick up a few supplies and of course sample the local bakery, Justine is in luck and she has a yummy scallop pie!   From here we start I guess what is the Great Ocean road proper, where the road snakes around the coastline.   While narrow, it’s not too bad with the van.  We’re stopped a few times by roadworks.

We pull into the tiny hamlet of Wye River and the caravan park is the largest thing here.  The park ends up being huge. It snakes its way inland up the valley on either side of the Wye River.  The caravan park has made the most of this by having all these “river side” sites.   We’ve been warned most sites are damp so be careful reversing onto them so not to chew them up to much.  We drive to the site we’ve been allocated, it’s really muddy when the awning would go.  We take a walk around, while this one is the worst, the others are not much better.   There are all these concrete sites, but these are already all booked out.   We find a couple of sites that are better and Justine talks to the staff and we find one that’s free. 

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After we setup, we take a walk to the front of the park and across the road to the beach, when we drove in I could see machinery on the beach.  It seems they have groomed it to get rid of a lot of wood and debris.   We can see on the other side, the boat ramp at the Surf Club appears to have been damaged.  Justine recalls that they had a pretty destructive storm down this way a few weeks ago, so it seems they’re cleaning up after this.  The kids spend ages building a sand castle with their hands. 

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The surf, like all the way around this coast is so much calmer than we expected.  Another odd thing is the number of people in the water, there must be over a dozen people, sensibly most of them are in wetsuits, but is so damn cold, I’m not sure how much that helps.

As the afternoon wears on, more and more vans and people turn up.   It is Friday afternoon during school holidays, so I guess that’s to be expected.   We’re probably lucky we’ve been able to book into most places we’ve chosen.

Oddly for such a large commercial park, they are allow campfires in fire pits here.   I’m feeling I’ve missed out on my camp fire quota, and while we do still have some wood in the toolbox, I elect to buy some more at the local general store (while expensive, it not highway robbery).   Of course shortly after buying it, the rain settles in for the evening.

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Due to the rain, I bring the weber in under the awning and cook dinner.  I might need to try and figure some wet weather options for the front toolbox.  The Umbrella that we used at Narrung won’t cut it in this weather.

No stars due to the clouds, but Wye river has a large number of houses perched on the hills surrounding the valley that the caravan park is in, so we see all these lights dotted around the hills.