The Great Ocean Road

Hello from Adelaide! We spent the last two days driving on the Great Ocean Road from Melbourne to Adelaide, and now we're back with our old friends at solitaire VW, getting the car and trailer ready to hit the outback.

After twenty hours on airplanes and in airports it was nice to be on the open road-especially when that road was one of the great driving roads of the world. We stopped in Lorne for lunch (pb&j and fish and chips) and talked to a German dude with a sweet quadcopter. It had an asymmetrical design and a range of 2 km, plus an autopilot that could get it safely back home to you if you lost track of where you were. The guy flying it had added an Oculus Rift hooked up to a camera on the front to make flying even more fun. We tried to get some details out of him but, being German, he primarily answered in monosyllables.

(Pic: Rachel, hedgehog, and a crashed paper airplane in Lorne.)

The next place we stopped was at the Twelve Apostles. My camera couldn't do justice to them, so stay tuned for real photos.

(Pic: Anna and hedgehog at the Twelve Apostles.)

We spent the night in Warrnambool-probably my favorite name so far-and I passed out as soon as I hit my bed and didn't wake up for eleven hours. Jet lag!

In the morning we meet some very friendly, somewhat damp golden retrievers, then headed out for another chill day of driving. I stuck with Nathan and we went up the B1 by the Coorong for a scenic drive. We also ran into mosquitoes than I've ever seen in my life. It sounded like it was raining, but that was actually just the sound of thousands of mosquitoes dying on our windshield.

(Pic: Nathan with the dog he wished he could keep.)

We pulled off the road when we saw a sign for a sinkhole, having no idea what to expect. It turns out that Australians are weird, and there is therefore a town in Australia that had both a giant sinkhole and someone with enough money and time to turn it into a park, with fountains and terraces.

(Pic: A hole.)

We also saw Larry the lobster, which "is considered the most impressive of Australia's Big Things." I'll let you judge.

(Pic: A rather large lobster.)

Now we're in Adelaide. The next few days should be pretty quiet: trailer and car work in the daytime, watching Australian rules football at night. The next post will either be photos or be from the outback.

Cheers,
Rachel

P.s. The way I'm writing these posts doesn't allow me to embed photos in the middle, so for now they'll all be at the end and you can just match them with the captions. I'll see what I can do about that later.

(Pic: Australian road signs are great.)