Down to the Great Ocean Road

Hello family and friends!

We are going to have to do our first term break in two pages because we have so many pictures that we would love to share.

So here we go...
We headed out on our trip south through Canberra, the Capital of Australia. There we visited a NASA space site where they had huge radio satellites listening to whispers in space. We also saw a replica of the landrover that is doing research on Mars. This worked out perfect for Jocelyn who had just finished a unit on space.









The next day, we arrived in Torquay at our first camp ground in Australia. These guys really know how to camp. Many campgrounds here have camp kitchens, similar to out West Canada camping, only most of these camp kitchens are fully equipped with stoves, fridges, barbeques, sinks and even toasters. Now that is my type of camping!

This campground also had an interesting trampoline... kind of more like a jumping pillow.

Bells beach is minutes from Torquay, so we headed down to the beach to see the 2007 Rip Curl Pro surfing competition…only to find out that they had changed the venue down the Great Ocean Road since the surf was not good enough. Oh well… so we kept driving down the Great Ocean Road. We found the road similar to the Cabot Trail in Canada. Lots of windy road along the coast… beautiful!

Tom, Avery and Jocelyn got this great idea that we would stop at this nice lookout of the temperate rainforest on the Otway fly tree top walk. Mountain ash trees are the tallest flowering plants in the world! Here is a video of our walk in the forest looking at one of the trees.



To my surprise, the walk was not only a walk in the bush, but also a walk up a 6 million dollar construction of a metal ramp that slowly climbed up to the tree tops of these gigantic mountain ash, myrtle beech and blackwood trees. The final lookout is on a 45 metres high tower.

I didn’t look down very much, and managed to make it up to the top to join them. As you can see from the video, I am not too comfortable with the tower swaying in the wind up at the top.



They especially found it a treat to walk out the cantilever which has nothing underneath it.... yeash. I skipped that one. Now they really want to head out to the grand canyon to the cantilever with the glass bottom ... and I am having second thoughts. The trees were enormous, 100 m tall! We wished we had Grandpa and Uncle Mark here with us to enjoy these trees.

When we arrived to Joanna beach in Otway National Park the surf competition only had ½ hour to go... and the next day they were heading back to Bells Beach the opposite way than we were heading... Well at least we got to watch some of it. The surf was wild and rough. We were then informed that there are lots of injuries in this sport…go figure. We camped in the Park overnight for some real rustic camping… pit toilets! Jocelyn was pleased. We met a lovely teacher with her dog and walked the beach at sunset as she described teaching in Victoria.

The next day we headed of to the 12 Apostles. These are kind of like the rocks or flower pots of New Brunswick.


We took heaps of photos here! Jocelyn took a video here.

There are really not 12 Apostles standing anymore, as some have crumbled down, but here is Jocelyn taking a count of things. This video is fantastic... she should consider a future in this!



When we went down to the beach at the 12 apostles Avery took this video. We all had a good laugh at this one too.



We also visited the Cape Otway Lightstation which is the oldest surviving lightstation on mainland Australia. Our guide spoke about the many shipwrecks along this coast and the history of the area. He new more trivia than the average teacher. Too bad it was not the season for whales in the area though.

Bye for now,
The Andress'