Otway National Park

21^st April

We didn’t make it to Scienceworks in the end on Tuesday afternoon, and went to the museum instead, which was just as good. That night Jane and Paul and their kids came over for dinner which was lovely to all catch up, and then yesterday morning we headed off from Melbourne in some uninspiring drizzle. The Navman we’re using was great in Melbourne proper to find our way between Penny and Nick’s house and Tom and Colette’s house, but for some reason we really struggled with it in Geelong, only because it kept wanting to take us the fastest route (inland highway), when we wanted to go along the Great Ocean Road, the scenic way. Even after living in Melbourne for a few years we had never been along the Great Ocean Road, so I’m really glad that we did. We finally got out of Geelong, had a sandwich in Torquay and even though it was a cloudy grey day the view along the road was still fantastic, very twisty and turny and some great cliffs with pounding sea. It was a pretty long day in the car what with getting lost in Geelong (and we didn’t even travel that far in terms of distance) so the kids were pretty sick of it by the time we got to the Aire River East campground in time to set up and cook dinner in the dark. We’ll be here for 3 nights so we’ve set up the annex roof (first time this trip!) and are able to spread out a bit more and work out where to put things. There were quite a few people already here when we got here, and even more by the evening (it’s a free site and you’re allowed campfires).

Tomorrow is the first of a 5 day long weekend so I’m expecting even more people will probably turn up tonight. If they don’t mind the cold that is – it looked to be a beautiful day this morning and although it’s not raining or anything I’m absolutely FREEZING. Possibly because we gave in to Conor’s requests and sat around this morning playing a board game (Risk) so when we go for a walk or ride soon that will help. The kids have got their lego out for the first time this morning which is working ok, the table is on a bit of an angle although we’ve propped up one side of legs so there’s still a bit of a danger of everything sliding off – before we had it propped up last night there were literally peas rolling down the table (unfortunately I was on the low side). We were all warm last night in bed though thank goodness, after buying an extra blanket from the Salvos in Melbourne. Hopefully in a month or so we’ll be in warmer latitudes and won’t need them (and then we have to find somewhere to store them).

Nick and I are still recovering a bit from the whole pack-up-and-go experience I think, and turned off the light last night at 7.30pm with the kids for a 12 hour sleep. A couple of those and I’ll be good to go again – I spent quite a bit of Melbourne fine during the day but coming to a crashing halt at about 8pm each evening unfortunately, so I was very glad that we were staying with friends and still got to see them in (my) waking hours.

One lot of our neighbours in the campsite are Russian speakers so I’m understanding the (very) occasional word, but it has occurred to me that from their tone of voice it sounds like they’re constantly fighting which is slightly disconcerting. The other side have a generator so, although it’s a basic campground in terms of no showers etc, it’s still not quite the ‘getting away from it all’ experience. I guess we’re still too close to civilisation (plus it’s school holidays).

22^nd April

We survived our first night of rain last night pretty well really. A bit of water came into the tent but we didn’t notice until the morning because we had rubber mats down under the kids’ beds. It’s not that we haven’t taken the trailer camping in the rain before, but knowing that we don’t have a house to go home to the next day if everything is wet makes it a bit different. I felt that we’d already acclimatised and become rugged campers when we drove back to the campsite from Apollo Bay in the rain, decided we didn’t need to get takeaway just because it was raining, then cooked our stir fry in the dark (with headlamps). I know being 20 mins from a town isn’t exactly ‘rugged’ but I’m just trying to make myself feel good early on J

One of the great things about Otway National Park is that there are a lot of wild koalas living here – we just noticed one sitting eating quite low down in a tree right over someone’s tent - I guess they’re quite used to people being around. We went to the Cape Otway Lighthouse in the afternoon and the road in there had loads of cars pulled over on the side taking photos of them in the trees.

The lighthouse was pretty cool, but also pretty freaky being up on the platform in the wind. There was a guide sitting inside up there and apparently he gets the job of cleaning the windows all year ‘round! It was a 4 – 5 gale force wind yesterday he said and I hardly wanted to go out on the platform to look at the view let alone stand out there with a squeegee. I had never thought about Australia having a lot of shipwrecks but it seems that this coast has an awful lot – there was a sign listing them over the last couple of hundred years and a couple of things around the lighthouse mentioned it was set up to host shipwreck survivors.

Unfortunately we’re out of mobile range at the campsite, so I’ll have to load up a couple of days’ worth of blog at once when we next get into a town. It’s a wild woolly day today (Good Friday) and we’re hoping that the Otway Fly treetops walk is open. They also have a cool sounding big long flying fox type of thing where you zoom through the tree tops attached to a cable between platforms for an hour or more, but it’s hundreds of dollars for a family, so we might have to pass on that one unfortunately. We’re trying out a stew in our thermal cooker today because we’re getting tired of coming home late and cooking in the dark, so fingers crossed that it goes well. I’m not entirely convinced after my test run at home didn’t go so well, but maybe your expectations are also lowered when camping!

Later… the treetop walk at the Otway Fly was really cool – amazingly tall Mountain Ash trees 2 or 300 years old (apparently you can tell how old they are by their diameter at waist height). Conor and Nick were brave enough to climb up to the top of the tower which was part of the treetop walk – 47m above ground level. I made it about ¾ way up and vertigo got the better of me. Daniel decided we were all crazy and didn’t even attempt it. We also had lunch and a nice walk at Triplet Falls nearby – and there we saw an Otway snail in the wild (spotted by Conor). They are interesting partly because they are only native to this area, but even more so because they are the only carnivorous snail in the world, and eat insects etc. Because of this I expected them to be quite big but they were no different in size to a normal garden snail. We have a photo but haven’t downloaded it yet. Heading back now via Bends café (thanks for the recommendation Penny and Nick) and to see how our thermal cooker is going.

video games

Penny and Nick live in such a great location (North Melbourne) that seems to be handy to everything so far, and they even have room in their garage to park our trailer. After our morning ride around Royal Park we got Tram 57 into town to meet Uncle Tom for some fantastic dumplings at the ‘Spicy Fish’ in Chinatown. In the afternoon on Penny and Nick’s recommendation we visited the ACMI (Aust Centre for the Moving Image), pretty much purely because they have a permanent exhibition where you can play computer games.

The idea involves explaining the history of film, audio, the Internet, social media, video games (so there’s also some original old ones), but the main attraction of course for Conor and Daniel was a bank of computer games which were surrounded by kids (being school holidays) and had them glued for hours. It also had cool other exhibits where you can go into a booth containing lots of cameras all around you, you do a matrix movie-type move and it films you from all angles and emails you a link to the short film. There were also examples of how the Australian accent has evolved in film and tv which had little clips of tv shows since the 60’s (although mostly from the 70s and 80s and beyond) and was very nostalgic – Prisoner, Neighbours, Kylie Mole, Roy and HG, The Castle, D Generation etc.

Today is market day so we’ll visit the Vic Markets with Penny and her kids to shop for dinner tonight with Jane, Paul and their kids, and perhaps Scienceworks in the afternoon.

Melbourne

We had a nice morning in Holbrook yesterday – beautiful weather, and we managed to find the keys to the bike lock so we could go for a ride around and up to have a walk around on the submarine HMAS Otway which is parked there and available for climbing on. 

There also happened to be a model train ride attraction open on Sunday mornings (same size as the ones at Kingston) so we went for a ride on that which travels along the river and past nice willows. We could also see where there was quite a bit of flooding in October and February – up to Brige’s neck height apparently. 

All that sightseeing took us a while so we were the last ones to pack up at the campground, so much so that the owners came and asked us if we were staying another night (all the grey nomads were packed and ready to go by about 8.30 while we were still eating our porridge). After having packed in a rush on Saturday, we’re still working out where to put things in the trailer and how to jam it all in, so hopefully we’ll get better at that and faster at pulling down camp. So we set off just before lunch, and our lunch stop was decided for us when we remembered that not far down the road we would have to dump all of our fruit… or attempt to eat it all first.

We rolled into Melbourne just after 4pm, found Penny and Nick’s amazing new house and then headed straight off for dinner at Tom and Colette’s to see their new house which is a lovely old Victorian long skinny one which they’re renovating one bathroom at a time.

So now we have a couple of days here in Melbourne and the weather is beautiful so it’s looking like a bike ride this morning, followed by dumpling lunch with uncle Tom, and Federation Square and the Moving Image museum this afternoon (which apparently has video games you can play which is a big attraction).

We've started!

We’ve finally headed off, although at about 11.30am today it didn’t seem like it would ever happen as we were really behind in packing and cleaning. In the end we were only 15 minutes late in taking everything out of the house for the deadline when the tenants were to move in (luckily they were late). Of course we still had another run to the storage unit and recycling centre to complete after that, and finally headed off just after 2pm.

Once we were on the road Daniel commented that we were just like a snail on wheels, carrying our house on our back, and so now we have christened our trailer ‘the snail’. Conor also took some pictures in the car which we will load up soon.

We can’t start this adventure without thanking everyone who has helped us to make it happen – we fully appreciated the enormity of it today, that we wouldn’t have been able to do it without so much help from all of our family and friends.

So a big big thank you, you know who you all are, to those who fed us this week in their homes and with food parcels, welded bits onto the trailer, entertained the kids, lugged boxes, gave or found us packing boxes, those who gave the kids trip-sized presents, organised goodbyes, who came and laboured at house working bees, lent us a trailer, put up with our extra recycling in their bins, took our ‘last minute’ mountain of rubbish to the tip, who are looking after our mail, looking after our house, fish and worm farm minding, and of course those who provided moral support.

Because we were a bit late heading off we didn’t make it to Jingellic unfortunately (sorry Julie), and have stopped at a caravan park in Holbrook for a lovely night under clear skies, with lots of stars and a nearly full moon. It wasn’t quite our idea of a free, self sufficient camp but it was just as well in the end because we had the car fridge up too high so the sausages, lettuce and tomatoes were frozen solid (the beer only had little shavings of ice in it) and it was just as well that we’re somewhere civilised enough to have a microwave to defrost them in J

The only other slight bother is that what with the new bike rack, we now can’t open the tool box with the tarp, tool to put the trailer legs down and dustpan and brush in it. Might be a job for Melbourne to work that one out.

Tomorrow we keep on going down the highway to family and friends in Melbourne.

We’re finally on our way, hooray!

This is what we're living in at the moment.... trying to work out what we can pack, what we can't pack yet, and what we can fit in the trailer to take with us.