Day 22 – Wye River – Lorne Loop

About 3am the winds start to pick up and the awning starts flapping about, Justine’s not sure if she secured one of the fitting when putting it up, so feels obliged to go out and check.  From then to about 6am the winds keeps up neither of us got much sleep in all the noise.   At 6 the wind just seemed to stop, and we finally drop off to sleep, so it is really late when we get up.

We load up and drive to Lorne, it’s only about 20km up the road, and this is some of the really classic Great Ocean Road, where it cuts into the cliff.  It so reminds us of the road around Kaikoura in NZ.  One section is really narrow, that might be fun tomorrow with the van on.

We go to stop at the Sheoak falls, but the small carpark is full, so we might do this on the way back.

As we pull into Lorne, which is a MUCH larger town than I was expecting, we stop at a carpark overlooking the beach.  To our surprise there is some form of Surf Life Saving competition on and the beach and water is full of people and surfboats.

Needless to say as we take a loop though town the roads and the footpaths are absolutely packed with people, too many people for me.

I did look at doing a loop back to the van park, but you need to drive a fair way inland so it’s too much, at least this way we get to see this section of the GOR in both directions. 

A quick detour up to Teddys lookout, something you really wouldn’t want to drag a van up to.  Some of the streets up are so steep, there’s one we drive past, I swear it looks like the part of a roller coaster as you breach the top.   Teddys is pretty impressive.

Onto Erskine falls, this and Hopetoun are probably the most well-known here.   And like Hopetoun it is a long steep walk down to the falls,  230 steps if anyone wanted to know.   But it is really worth it.     The walk back up is challenging.   That and it’s so cold today.  The BOM has it at around 8°, but with a “feels like” of 1.6°  Ok Yeah!

I get Justine to drive back so I get a chance just to look out the window, this is not really the road that can you can drive and take all of the scenery in.   We drive past the Wye River and back a bit to Kennett River, there is this road just outside the town that you can drive down that is lined by trees that are meant to be Koala central.   We drive the road and pull over at a few spots, Justine is really keen to find one, and after a lot of spotting we think we see the backside of one in the distance through the binoculars. The kids aren’t convinced it’s a koala, we are pretty certain (well, it’s bum anyway), so all up a bit of an anticlimax.  All the better that we got to see one back in Aire River.

Back to the park, and the kids hire out some peddle cars and have a ball.  These places are really made for these things.

A drizzly afternoon,   I catch up on some blogging, it would seem any chance of a fire is off, we only hope there is not the wind of last night.

After dinner (with stars so maybe a fire could have happened?) and some TV, the kids go to sleep. We hear the awning start to go.  Nothing for it, I’ve already packed away the chairs and anything else that might get wet, so to save off a repeat of last night we roll the awning up.

Tomorrow off to Melbourne to see Justine’s brother and then on Monday to get some of the decals replaced on the van.