After a few nights in Melbourne, we set off for our trip to the Great Ocean Road.

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Our first stop wasn’t very far into the trip – we stopped at Torquay to buy some food for lunch, drove randomly towards the water (it was raining and we had no plan), saw a park with shelters, decided to have a rainy picnic and then found that the park had this awesome playground. We were there for much longer than planned, even with on and off rain, and eventually talked the kids into leaving. Our accommodation along the Great Ocean Road was at Apollo Bay (we had decided in this in favour of an extra night in Melbourne, originally we’d considered staying in Torquay to start off the trip).

And then the next stop, not very far away either (we don’t seem good at road trips – lots of stopping) – Bell’s Beach!

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Bell’s Beach – very noisy. The waves crashing in combined with the high cliffs created an interesting noise environment. They were setting up for the Quiksilver Pro which was the following weekend, so we got to investigate the seating set up for that and see a few surfers in action.

Unfortunately our relaxed approach to the start of the day meant that we could only fit one more stop in as we wanted to get to Apollo Bay by the time it was dark. The adults had a list of something that we couldn’t miss.

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We parked at the bottom of the hill in what seemed like to be the official car park. There was also a playground nearby that we had to stop at for a while (sense of theme here?) before walking up the hill. There were parks further up, but not many. With some discussion, we all made it up the hill eventually. There was a little walk out to a viewing platform near the light house, which I did with the older child once we had all taken photos of ourselves next to the light house and walked around. The little one’s legs were tired. And then someone (I can’t remember who) had to go to the toilet and we’d seen one near the bottom of the hill, so down we went again. And probably had to stop at the playground too.

Then back into the car. All the stopping meant that we only stopped in Lorne to buy dinner food at the Foodworks because we weren’t sure what we’d find between there and Apollo Bay. It looked really pretty and when we go back, a proper look at Lorne is on the list. We were driving through when Tim said, “That bridge looks really familiar”, then a few minutes later said, “I think this is the town from Not a Nibble.” I googled and he was right! Which then made it worse that we didn’t have time to stop and explore (it was quite late by now) although that fact was probably more interesting to the adults who have read the books a thousand times than to the kids.

Anyway, next time, more time is needed on this part of the trip. We take a lot of stops and there was a lot of awesome playgrounds out there.