Great Ocean Road to Mornington
Trip Start
Dec 31, 2008
1
20
40
Trip End
Mar 27, 2009
Mornington,
Victoria,
Australia
Monday, February 9, 2009
On a side note, I picked up a newspaper in Lorne to catch up on the news. One thing that has been terrible and inescapabable while we were on this trip was the news of the wildfires ripping through Australia, less than 50 miles from where we driving. If you haven't heard about these, check out this article: http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13092587&source=features_box_main . Anyways, all of the newspapers and the news were almost exclusively covering this story, and the pictures were really shocking to see. Over 1000 homes were lost, over 200 people died, and two entire towns were entirely wiped out. They've been having all kinds of fundraisers on tv, similar to the Hurrican Katrina reaction in the U.S., in an effort to help the people affected. As most people reading this probably know, my family lost our home 10 years ago on Christmas Day to a fire, so I understand to some extent what many of them are going through and obviously my heart goes out to those people affected.
After hanging out in Lorne for just a bit, we kept on moving along. We stopped at a big lighthouse, and tried to find a golf course that supposedly had 300 kangaroos living on it, but couldn't locate it, and went to a number of other stops on the way. My Aunt Jan had told me that her neighbor's son owned a restaurant in Bells Beach, which we were stopping at along the way, so we had decided we would try to eat lunch at his restaurant when we arrived. Unfortunately, though, Bells Beach was in an isolated area where there really weren't any restaurants, so we never found the place. However, Bells Beach is famous mainly for two reasons. First of all, it is the home to one of the world's most famous surfing competitions because it has some of the best waves in the world. However, far more notable is that it is the location of the final scene in the legendary movie and BrettGansen favorite, Point Break, where Keanu "I am an FBI agent" Reeves arrests Patrick Swayze, but then lets him surf the "100 year storm", in which Swayze presumably dies.
After failing to find anything in Bells, we moved onto the nearby city of Torquay, where we had lunch at a cafe, and I had the largest omelette in the history of omelettes. We then drove down to Queenscliff, a beautiful small town with a great downtown, where we then caught the ferry across "The Rip". Melbourne is located on a bay that is enclosed by two peninsulas to the south that don't quite meet, but come very close. The Rip is that channel between the two. We drove our car onto the ferry and then took the relaxing and scenic 45 minute ride across the channel.
On the other side of the channel was the Mornington Peninsula, which is a really great area full of wineries, lighthouses, and lots of ocean scenery. We drove around the peninsula for about three hours before we had to head back to Melbourne for our flight. We saw literally dozens of wineries, went up to the top of a mountain called Arthur's Seat for a look down on the peninsula, and saw a few other sights, as well as a ton of golf courses. You could definitely spend a long time on this peninsula if you liked to golf or do wine tastings. The natural scenery is great as well.
After that, we simply headed back to the airport and arrived back in Sydney around 9 at night. I took the train back and got home, and quickly headed off to bed as I was exhausted from the weekend. All in all, I thought the Great Ocean Road and the Mornington Peninsula were great, and I'd maybe have liked to have done another day or two on them. On the other hand, Melbourne was so-so in my opinion. We had fun going out, but there didn't seem to be a whole lot to see there and if someone asked me if they should go there when they visit Australia, I'd probably recommend somewhere else, unless they were driving the Great Ocean Road.
