The next day we hit the Great Ocean Road.It was a sunny day which was great because it would have been pointless in the rain.The views of the crashing surf are gorgeous and definitely the most spectacular views are by the Twelve Apostles. Of course that’s where hordes of tour buses stop and way too many people mill about the small lookout but what can you do. Just do your best to take pictures without anyone interfering.

Twelve Apostles

There were other lookout points for rock formations which were also gorgeous, and had less people around, like the London Bridge. It was a long day of driving and I would have loved to spend more time around the coast and possibly try surfing in Torquay, but we only had one day.

Be weary of cops down there though because later we received a ticket from a speed camera when we had driven down there with our van for going 108km/h (67m/h) in 100 (62 m/h) zone which isn’t fast at all compared to other places of the world, but in AU the speed limit is low and you have to follow it exactly. I was driving the rental back to Melbourne, as Hendrik and I chauffeured his parents around all day. I was making my way slowly (100k/h) down the long straight road and Hendrik was bored and impatient and told me to go faster, that nothing would happen.So I told him over and over again that he’d pay for my ticket if I got one and when he agreed I sped up.About five minutes later I saw a cop do a Uie, and now he was following me.I promptly slowed down, and he followed me for a few minutes and then pulled me over.I only got a warning but I made sure not to let Hendrik live it down and it was even more ironic when we received the ticket for the van since Hendrik had been driving then.So don’t speed, you will get pulled over.

We left Lake Macquarie early since we had a lot to do the next day. We wanted to go surfing in Manley, since we knew there was usually good surfing there and we hadn’t yet been able to surf on the trip. Miraculously, we made it to the beach without a hindrance through Sydney morning rush hour, but when we arrive there, there were hardly any waves. A few waves would come every 20 minutes. We decided to go for it anyway since we had come all the way out to Manly and we saw others trying too. It wasn’t a warm day and we rented wet suits as well as surfboards and therefore we didn’t get to use our new rash shirts which still had their tags attached. It was a very slow surfing day, and I only caught about 3 waves but never managed to stand. We had to leave Manley by noon and go to the opposite end of Sydney to Kingsgrove because there we had the rest of our stuff in storage.

Sydney

We had to take apart the whole van and luckily there was a lot of storage space under the bed which we utilized to the fullest and we were able to fit at least three times as many belongings than we had currently with us. We thought we would be even slower than we had been previously which was about 100km/h. We always joked that even if we wanted to speed we couldn’t. We could drive with the pedal to the medal and the van would not go faster. It was like cruse control. Going uphill was terrible because it would slow down drastically and we had to down shift so it wouldn’t stall. The engine would growl and the speedometer would slowly decrease and if there was a passing lane, cars would be passing us. Sometimes on rare occasions the van would have its good days and it would get up to 130 km/h which was even above speed limit. We kept trying to figure out what cased the sudden surge of speed, opening the water tank, full gas tank, air conditioning, but nothing seemed to do the trick. And now when we were so heavy the van had a good day. We drove down to Wollongong and briefly walked around the town, beach, and lighthouse.

The next morning we were off to Noosa where there was a festival going on so there was no parking anywhere near town, but we were able to find parking at the beach so we went boogie boarding. It looked like a cute town when we drove through it, and we wished we had more time to spend there since it looked like there is some good surfing, but we were worried about falling behind schedule, and we had to go further south the same day.
We made our way down to Beerwah, which is close to Brisbane and the home to the Australia Zoo. I had wanted to visit the zoo because I had heard so much about it after Steve Irwin’s passing.