Melbourne and Great Ocean Road

12-1-2010 (Tuesday)

Woke up pretty late (9), Zeb slept late due to travel yesterday and the fact that Zeb watched the movie with us.
Ruben got two fresh coffees and some yoghurt for the kids. Around 10:15 we hit the streets, walking to Swanson (main street in CBD (central business district)) taking the number 8 tram to Toorak road in the neighborhood of South Yarra. We bought a super pram so now we have two prams (strollers).
Before buying the pram we did an internet search back in the hotel on kids stores, travelling using internet is such an advantage. Not that we rely on internet only; we brought over 5 kilo of travel books with us.
How did people got around without internet and mobile phones??

We walked on to Chapel street, main shopping street covering the neighborhoods of South Yarra, Toorak and Prahan. In Melbourne these kind of neighborhoods are the nicest to visit. The real center is CBD, which is not really nice. We walked the greater part of Chappel street. In Prahan we went to a public pool and the kids loved the kids pool. We only brought bathing suits for the kiddies.
In the pool we encountered our first animal in the wild: a Possom. That’s a small kangaroo like animal, not to be confused with a Pigem.
We also bought a Ripcurl swimming pants for Zeb: really cool!! back in our hotel we refreshed ourselves to go out for a bite in, we went to the southside of the Yarra river. It has a nice development of all kind of restaurants. Due to the kids we choose a big food court so they could have Pizza and we something of our choice, not a good choice.

Walking along the river it started raining, so we had to run for a taxi.

13-1-2010 (Wednesday)
Late wake up again, kids sleep late so wake up late. We went for breakfast near the hotel on Russel street. We met a nice Dutch girl that moved to Australia two years ago and loves it.

Back in the hotel Sharon packed some last things and laid down for half an hour, looks like see got a kind of food poisoning from the breakfast. She did not feel ok the rest of the day.
Sharai and Ruben went to the car rental on Elizabeth street, a ten minute walk from the hotel. To be honest Ruben was little tensed about the left driving.
We got a huge Mitshubitsi, with two booster seats and a Garmin GPS (tom tom like). Ruben and Sharai drove to the hotel to pick up Sharon and Zeb.

All set, we head off for our first stop on the great ocean road; Torquay. This first part of the great ocean road is called ‘Surf Coast’. On Bells Beach and Torquay are some of the best waves of Australia. We had late lunch in a nice creperie in Torquay.

The unfortunate thing today is that the car dvd set we brought does not work in the car, the 12v plug does not connect well. The kids watch a lot of dvd in the hotel rooms, now we set up our laptop to watch dvd in the car. Let’s hope it will work in the campervan. Favorite dvd’s are Nijntje the musical and Monsters inc. Sharon and Ruben can be understudy for the musical Nijntje when back in Holland.

The coast is so beautiful, it’s almost difficult to describe. Closest that comes to mind is the coastal outline on the west coast of the US near Carmel. But over here there are small beaches and bays around every corner. We can imagine this is one of the scenic highlights of Australia.

From Torquay we drove on to Angelsea, situated between Torquay and Lorne. In Angelsea we saw our first Kangaroos in the wild. A whole bunch were eating on the fairway of a golf course.
We drove on to Lorne, which is our destination for the next three days. We checked in the Lorne Hotel.

The room is pretty back to basic compared to what we used to the last 12 days. But the hotel is situated beautiful in the bay. After we organized the room, we went for a walk to check the area and look for a restaurant. Probably Sharai wasn’t feeling well, cause she vomited in her new ‘pram’. After she was done, she danced and sang as if nothing has happened. Dinner wasn’t really great. Kids had a bath, watched “Nijntje; the musical” and fell asleep (too) late.
The first day driving on the left went pretty well, despite one time ending up on the wrong side of the road.