Melbourne and the Great Ocean Road

We have been enjoying our stay in Melbourne with our extremely gracious friends who are letting us stay here for 8 days. They have 3 kids, ages 13, 10 & 6. Yes, we are overstaying our welcome and loving being in a “home” again. Our kids are overjoyed: playing with their kids and having access to toys, games, Wii, trampoline, TV and books. It is so nice to stay in one place and stretch out, instead of having one tiny hotel room to live in and packing/unpacking every other day.


With our friends, we went to a science museum with a Star Wars exhibit going on and to Phillip Island to see the penguin parade. (That is a famous thing to do when you are in Melbourne. The smallest penguins in the world waddle up from the beach to their burrows every night at dusk.) We also took the kids to an indoor pool.

Then over the weekend, we took a road trip along the “Great Ocean Road” (I’ll call it GOR). That is another famous thing to do here, near Melbourne. It is a stretch of coast road, very similar to driving Hwy 1 (Pacific Coast Hwy) in California, on that nice stretch near Monterey, with gorgeous ocean views. There were neat things to do along the GOR, we looked in tide pools, saw wild koala bears and kangaroos, did some nice hikes, and saw famous rock formations off the GOR along the coast.
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Here is what Jacob (age 11) had to say about the koala viewing:
I think it was really magnificent because you are just driving by a normal eucalyptus tree and scanning it for koalas and when you see them you just see this big ball of fur. And then eventually you can work out all the details like when it is sleeping and just hanging there at dizzying heights or feeding. And it was really cool to see them climb, because we saw one climb and they stick out one hand and bring up the body. And it was crazy how they were bringing themselves up. And the funniest koala I saw was probably one that was hanging at the very end of a thin branch. It was an incredibly fat koala and this teeny branch was holding him up. I probably saw over 30, maybe I’d estimate 35-38. I made $5 dollars because dad was giving me 10 cents for seeing a koala and 20 cents for seeing it first. With the five dollars I bought a koala coin purse. And I’m going to dedicate the rest of my money to buy another coin purse from Australia. There was a koala with a baby that was pretty cool, because you could just see a mom hanging on lazily and every now and then you could see the baby kicking its legs. We saw all these koalas about 2 minutes away from a town and we saw a vacation house right next to where the mother with the baby was. It was just awesome that 2 minutes from civilization you could see these wild koalas. So on the road we were driving down to the hotel and all of the sudden we saw a wallaby. And all of a sudden when my dad said “Wallaby!” I looked out the front and I saw it immediately. We kept telling my dad to stop because we were getting closer, but he didn’t stop and my mom couldn’t get a picture because it jumped away.


Here is Charlie’s (age 8) description of seeing the kangaroos:
So we jumped over a fence because there was no other way to get in. So then we walked on a path and there were probably like 30 kangaroos jumping around. When we got there, there was a kangaroo just about 3 yards away on the path. When we got closer they all just went jumping away. The kangaroos were about 6 feet tall and it didn’t seem like they had any joey’s in their pouches. They were really cool because the way they jumped and the way they balanced on their tail was really cool and interesting. The wild I think was more cool because we actually got to get 2 yards away from them, and in the zoo you are usually kept quite far away. And then when we all left my dad was the only one there, and I wanted the car keys so I could get into the car. So I went back over the fence and came running up behind him. And he thought ‘Oh shoot I was too close and now they are attacking me.’ And then when I said ‘The Keys?’ then he said ‘Oh no, now they are going to steal my car.’ And then Jacob scolded me for running up behind Dad and scaring away all the kangaroos.


And finally, here is Henry’s (age 6) journal entry about the GOR. See if you can decipher it!:


The Great Ocean Raod.
We went to a cool baech and saw cool starfish and we saw a little crab. They did except I saw two. We saw kawalas and wala bees too. We even saw kangaroos. We saw about 30 of them! Prablable the funniest part was dad ran over too prity birds!!! The reason he crushed the prity bird is because he did it on a accident. Except it was sad too. Excep Charlie said that they where in dangerd except he was rong. When we saw the kangaroos we went into there field. They where scard very scard. When we got clost to them they hoped (hopped) back, nodest (notice) how I said hoped (hopped) not ran? Uur friends dog named Chily is fun to play with except some times he is a bad dog.