Hello and welcome to another exciting day in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia!! After reading several of my postings, I realized that many of them start basically the same way. So, in the spirit of mixing things up, I decided a quote from Anchorman referencing the day's title would suffice not only as a better introduction to the day, but also provide relevance to the day's experiences! Off we go!
I slept in until 6:30am this morning and quickly dressed, grabbed a bottle of water and the last two hot cross buns I had brought with me from Brisbane, and met the group for our 7:00am departure on The Twelve Apostles Drive. I was sure what to expect today, as I only knew "The Twelve Apostles" was a reference to some sort of rock formation off the coast. Our trip would last until 9:00pm though, so I assumed a variety of things would be involved during the 14 hour day.
Anoop had rented us a 21 passenger bus and driver to pick us up at the RMIT Village and drive us all along the coast of Victoria up to view the Twelve Apostles. We piled in the bus and we were on our way! The going was slow, as the road twisted and turned following the Australian coastline (sometimes within a few feet of the clifftop edge), but we gradually meandered our way across the rugged terrain to various tourist destinations. The group enjoyed the scenic tour, but I don't think it is too amiss to remark that our driver had some trouble shifting through the gears through the mountains (we came to complete stops on inclines at times) and I don't think we reached any speed equivalent or over 40 mph until we headed back for Melbourne on the freeway. However, let me slow down a bit and show some pictures of the Australian bush we passed by along the way to our destinations. It was hard to find openings in the vegetation wide enough to snap a decent photograph, but here are some shots I managed to take:
The farms here are absolutely gorgeous, complete with plenty of fat cattle and sheep, maybe even a llama with wild roos and koalas running about! I would like to further remark that these pictures fail to do the countryside justice - the experience and vistas here are incredible!
After a few hours we stopped for lunch in Apollo Bay, where a few of us ventured into a local eatery. I ended up getting fried tempura barramundi (a local Australian fish) and chips (aka fries) and my meal was less than spectacular. The fish itself was edible, but the batter it was fried in (tempura batter apparently) was far from being one of my favorites. Will had a chicken sandwich with chicken that looked more like dough (apparently it was not edible) and Andrew had a hamburger that ended up being (quite literally) a section of meatloaf with ketchup topping placed between two hamburger buns. All in all it was probably the worst meal of the trip, but an interesting experience as tourists nonetheless. A few folks enjoyed some world-renowned, award winning gelatto (I decided to not spend any more money in the small town) before we loaded back up and were on our way again. Trading stories with some of the other people, it was apparent that we picked up the short end of the lunch stick, as most of the other people on the bus had enjoyed great lunches.
The journey continued, but once we started arriving at tourist spots, it was only a matter of minutes before we arrived at the next. Here are some photos of the various places we were privileged to see along the coast. All of the views were absolutely breathtaking!:
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| Split Point - First stop (before lunch) |
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| Split Point Lighthouse |
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| "Unstable Cliffs" |
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| The Famous "Twelve Apostles" - some of the brethren have washed away... |
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| Had to hold my hat on - gusty winds! |
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| Seaside Seaweed Art |
Everyone thoroughly enjoyed the views and getting to walk down on the beach. The sand here is more brown than in the gulf states, but it was incredibly soft!
We took a much shorter and faster route back to Melbourne along the freeway. We ended up getting back to the Village at 7:00pm because we did not stop and eat dinner as previously planned. I went up to my room and spent some time catching up on facebook, then took a short nap. About 8:30pm I left my room and found that everyone, except Patrick, had left for dinner, so the two of us decided to head out and find dinner and a grocery store. We grabbed a sandwich at Subway and then went in search of the Coles at Central Station. There was a Coles sign outside the train station (central station is actually a huge mall area that happens to have the train station in the basement), but it took us 10-15 minutes to navigate the mall and find it. Groceries for breakfast in hand, we set off back towards the Village.
I went back to my room with the intentions of catching up on some blogging, but soon decided to check facebook. About a half hour later I ventured out of my room and joined a few of the folks a couple rooms down. We hung out on the balcony area (sipping on some UK Dr. Pepper) and checked out some of "The You Tubes." We shared funny stories of things that had happened in the past (somewhat relative to the videos of the 1 hour milk challenge) and overall had a pretty relaxing and enjoyable time.
Fairly tired, I headed back to my room and hit the hay. Any intentions of working tonight would have to wait. We had no events scheduled for tomorrow, so I decided tomorrow would be designated as a work day! With that theory, I fell asleep - no alarm set!!
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