Great Ocean Road Day 1/3

We left Melbourne on Friday, it was another cloudy day, followed by rain as we ran back and forth from the car to the information center. Jess and I are both relieved to get on the road, let the fun begin!!!

Our first stop was in Bells Beach, this is the Aussie surfing capitol. As we drove down the "one" lane road toward the beach every other vehicle had a surf board on top of it. When we drove up it was more then I ever expected, the surf was large about 4m high the water to the east was littered with surfers waiting for the big wave. This is the view from the platform at Bell Beach. The beach in the background is our first trip into the OCEAN. The water was pretty cool and the waves kept getting bigger the whole time we were there.

The next stop was Airey's inlet, this was an unexpected stop but we were so 'awh' struck by the first beach that we had to check the next one out. This beach was so long , it must have run for almost 5km along the road, there were tons of people walking there dogs and running along it. We took the opportunity to write everyone at home a little message....

We had no real plans as we were driving, the road is set up so you can pick and choose what you want to see or stop at. We decided to do everything we could each day, this proved to be quite challenging. We checked out the first lighthouse on the road, split point lighthouse. This light house marks the Surf coast and guides ships into the Bass Strait which leads into Port Phillip. It was really neat and the picture I uploaded in Facebook is the view from the viewing platform there.

 

 I have been driving the whole way and from my point of view its been like playing Mario Kart in real life or being in a James Bond movie even though Im not driving an Aston Martin. This is a typical view on the road full of elevation changes and U-turns around every bend. They mark the speed limit as 80km/h on this road and 65km/h through U-turns, needless to say one should not be driving that fast even in a two door sports car.  Jess has been clutching the passenger door handle pretty hard.It was a beautiful drive all day long, you could taste the salt on your lips a we were driving because of all the sea spray from the waves. Breathtaking drive thus far, every corner makes you look twice and not want to look away, gotta keep the car on the road :) We took about 400 pictures this day, unfortunately way to many to post on here at once.

Lorne was the next big town on our stop, it was really windy and cold when we went through here, which is asahamed because there was a large wave generated pier that had space for diving off with swim ladders back to the top. This pier we are standing on in the photo generates 1/4 of the power for this whole little town, pretty amazing. 

We headed through Lorne pretty quickly and decided that we would spent the night in Apallo bay, not by choice. When we went to the information center in Melbourne, she convinced us that it would be hard to find accommodation if we didn't pre-book anything and talked us into staying in a B&B for $150 when we found out later when we arrived we could have found much cheaper accommodations, wing it is still the way to go.

Just outside of Lorne was another pit stop, Jess was all sad at this point because she was seeing all these waterfalls on the map and we had not seen any signs to go to any of them and sure enough two minutes later there one was. This was no easy task let me tell you, this was quite the hike up about 400 feet of stairs then down, then up, then down until we finally heard it. It was mind blowing,  at this point I was really starting to regret not having a better camera, my pictures are good but I'm sure they could be better.

Victory!!! Some sweat and complaining but we made it.

We got out of there around six o'clock and realized we still had a ways to Apallo so we zipped along into too town and checked into the B&B and then went of for some fish and chips. Only had a really small ketchup and it was more BBQ sauce than the good old Heinz. We had a nice little walk around town and then hit the sack.