I know i’ve mentioned in a lot of these blogs that we have had a few ‘lazy mornings’ (we are on holiday after all)…well, this morning takes the biscuit. I’m not saying that it was all down to Amy but…i had said the night before that we should be ready to leave at 10am and i would have made that…
So, after getting out of bed at about 9 and a brief chat about the Great Ocean Road (GOR) journey, we left about 13:00….
We decided that, as the weather was not particularly great for the early part of the week and was due to pick up Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, we would head inland from Melbourne to the end of the GOR and head along the GOR back to Melbourne, hoping to get some of the better weather.
The road inland was pretty nice. Quite a different scene to what we saw up North with the South being not too dissimilar to Scotland…although there is a lot more space and fewer hills. It’s very green with a lot of livestock as oppose to the sugar cane fields that we saw on the road up to Cairns.
We decided before we left that we would head towards Warrnambool which is at the end of GOR however, if we had time, we would head to the next town called Port Fairy. The reason for this was;
a) the bay at Port Fairy is a lot nicer
b) the town is a lot smaller so would be quite quaint
c) the name is fairly (fairy?) ridiculous
Anyway, as we made quite good time and reached Warrnambool at approx. 16:00, we decided to head to Port Fairy. It was a good decision in the end, the town was really nice and Warrnambool, with a population of 35,000, was really quite big relatively speaking.
When we reached Port Fairy, we had a quick drive around the town and decided to stay at a nice little ‘comfort inn’. After dropping the bags off, we went for a wander and stumbled across the ‘Caledonian Inn’ – the oldest licensed hotel in Victoria. Given the name and the heritage that the place had, we decided to go in for dinner and stay for a couple extra drinks. The bar, where we decided to have our dinner (there is a restaurant but when we arrived there was only a couple of granny’s having a cup of tea and the barman suggested having dinner in the bar area) was really good, classic ‘old man pub’ feel to it with the local Aussie’s enjoying a few post work ‘pots’ – the name given to the small half pints that i’ve seen quite a lot of Aussie’s drink.
After our dinner and drinks, we headed back to the hotel to catch a wee film and hit the hay. As we’ve been away from the ‘flashing box’ for a few weeks whilst we drove around in Vanessa, this was a bit of a treat. We had seen in the pub that ‘Inception’ was on TV that night so we headed back to see that…Amy got about 30 to maybe 35 minutes into it before she crashed out for the night. Not quite the record for staying awake (that was a total of 43 minutes) but a good innings given the exertion of the day…….
Tomorrow’s plan is to hit the Great Ocean Road properly and take in some of the views, specifically the 12 Apostles!
Port Fairy’s Main Street
graememckinley 