Winter Break 2023- Melbourne and Great Ocean Road

This year the girls winter break began on 23 June.  They get three weeks off, but we only took one to go on a family trip.  We left early on Saturday morning for the long drive down to Melbourne. Without stopping it would take about 7 hours to get there. We of course needed to make multiple stops, because that is just too long to for us to drive without making stops.

Our first stop was in Holbrook, a small town in New South Wales. We stopped here because they randomly have a full sized submarine in a park there. There is the original above water line superstructure of the Oberon Class submarine HMAS OTWAY just sitting on the ground.  I thought maybe we'd be able to go in it.  But people are not able to go inside, though you could walk on the top of it.  I forgot to get a good picture of it.  This is the best I have of it:

 We finally made it to Melbourne that evening.  We took a walk out in the city and went out for dinner.  We found a nice Japanese ramen place and had excellent agedashi tofu.  Below are some pictures from some of what we did while in the city.

 We found a fun park and the girls played and played:

I marched the family all around the city to see street art that Melbourne is famous for. I really enjoyed it.  The kids were so-so on all the walking. Lauren took over 20,000 steps, according to her fit bit.  We estimate we walked 6-7 miles our first day in the city. Here are some pics of the street art:

More pictures from our walks around the city:

 

 

 

 

 

 

The next day we went to a school holiday thing called "chaos lab."  It was aimed at younger kids, but our girls still had a good time playing with slime and in a ball pit.

Next we went to a place called Artvo. It is an immersive, ‘trick-art’ gallery.

We found this neat soccer game for the kids to play.

We also rode a free tram. It was really fun. We rode around on it for a good 30-45 minutes. This was my favorite part of the city.

Great Ocean Road

The Second half of our trip our trip was spent driving down Great Ocean Road, one of Australia’s most famous road trips. As such, it is considered a "must do" when you visit Melbourne.  Great Ocean road stretches for 243 km (about 150 miles) between Torquay and Warrnambool, with rugged cliffs, beautiful rock formations, scenic viewpoints, and charming little towns.  

We started our trip in Torquay, about 1.5 hours south of Melbourne. Torquay is a little seaside town that is considered the birthplace of Australian Surfing.  Here we checked out the Australian National Surfing Museum and looked around a surf brand outlets for Rip Curl and Billabong.

We also stopped at Fisherman's beach, where Mike tried out his newly gifted drone (drone footage to come I'm sure).  They also had a really cool sundial at this beach.

Our next stop was Bells Beach, Australia's most popular surf beach.  It hosts the Rip Curl Pro surf contest each Easter.  It was also mentioned in the original Point Break film.  It was too cold to get in the water, but it was fun to check out this beach.  We saw a lot of surfers in the water, including a lot of old(er) looking surfers. I still wasn't all that crowded and given how much parking was available, I imagine this place is swarmed in summer time.

No feet were broken on these rocks

some of the surfers we saw out in the water

Sasquatch (mike) sighting

We spent so much time at these first few stops, we had to cut out a lot of the other stops I had on my list.  There is just SO much see on Great Ocean Road.  Even the three days we had to do it, wasn't enough.  Though I figured out that part of the reason why is that the itineraries I researched were probably accomplished during the summer months, when the days are MUCH longer. We try to avoid a lot of driving at dawn/dusk here as they have so many nocturnal critters, and we don't want a car accident with one of them.  

Next we made a quick stop at Erskine falls.  We were supposed to be able to walk all the way down to the bottom of these falls, but the path was closed.  We were able to get about half way. 

We also stopped at some scenic overlooks:

Then we went on a "koala walk" in Kennet River to try and see some koalas in the wild. We did manage to see one, which was exciting.

Mike also got a great picture of my favorite bird here in Australia, a rosella:

This is us walking down the road looking for more koalas.

Then it was on to Apollo Bay, where we spent the night.  Before reaching our hotel, we went to hilltop view point called Marriner's Lookout. We got incredible views of the bay:

The next day we took a 1ish hour detour from Great Ocean Road into the Great Otway National Park.  There we went to Hopetoun falls.  It was quite the walk down to the falls, but even harder of a walk back up!

After Hopetoun falls, it was a quick trip over to a redwood forest:

On the way out of the Otways, we spotted a phone booth.  Mike always makes me take pictures of them

Next we went to Gibson Steps beach.

After 86 steps down to the beach, we got great views of what Great Ocean Road has to offer:

Next it was on to Twelve Apostles, the most famous stop on Great Ocean Road.  You can't get on the beach here, but can see the rock formations from a scenic overlook. Despite the name, there were never 12 rocks here, only 8.  Unfortunately one of them collapsed in 2005, so only 7 remain. Though to be honest, i don't know that I could even count seven.

After the 12 Apostles it was a quick stop at a couple more famous scenic overlooks-

London Bridge:

The Grotto-

This was Lauren's favorite, despite her "spicy" attitude that afternoon.

The next day we drove out to Warranambool. We skipped a lot of the other beaches because the family was just sort of beached out.  I wish we had more time to spend in the warranbool area, as there was more there I wanted to check out, but we just had breakfast in the city (at a great little cafe called Bohemia) and then went a bit west of Warranmbool to Tower hill Wildlife Reserve.  The reserve sits inside an extint volcano, and is home to many Australian animals.  I really wanted to go because you can see emus, koalas, kangaroos, wallabies, echnidas and birdsin the wild.  Sadly we didn't see ALL those animals, but were able to spot a lot more wild koalas, which was exciting.  This was Mike's favorite part of the trip.  We did two different walks at the reserve and probably spent 2 to 3 hours here.  

It was a nice, quick trip to Melbourne and Great Ocean Road. I wish we had more time to spend here, but we rushed back to get the Embassy's annual Fourth of July party.  

It was SO cold.  So so cold.  But the girls had a GREAT time.  There were hamburgers and hot dogs (though is was sold cold, it was like iceburgers and ice dogs), lots of treats, smores, and of course, fireworks. 

Happy early birthday America.