Great Ocean Road, Victoria
Saturday 20th March 2021
We left Sydney, just as the rain starting pouring down – literally. This was our 3rd attempt to do this trip, so nothing was stopping us – short of closed borders!
Our sons were holding the fort at home (and looking after the family dog) so we were off. The weather was dismal until we were 3 hours south of Sydney heading along the Hume Highway.
We stayed overnight at Ballarat, as we had wanted to avoid Melbourne, in case of an outbreak of COVID cases. We drove through Daylesford / Ballarat region and have earmarked this beautiful area of country Victoria as a definite place to come back and explore with more time. The drive ended up being close to 12 hours including stops, so we were exhausted.
Sunday 21st March 2021
Our plan today was to drive from Ballarat to the beginning of the Great Ocean Road today. The weather wasn’t great – but it was better than Sydney! We started at Bells Beach at the southern end.
The weather was wild. Our next stop was Urquhart Bluff. We enjoyed this stop and went down onto the sand to experiment with some different camera angles.
Urquhart Bluff 
Urquhart Bluff
We then continued our drive. The next stop was the Airlie Inlet and Split Point Lighthouse. The whole area was beautiful, even in the wild weather. The lighthouse was the used for the Round The Twist series.
We had quite a long stop here and enjoyed some beautiful scones and sandwich from the coffee shop behind the lighthouse. It was so pretty and stunning, even in these weather conditions.
Our next stop was the Great Ocean Road Memorial. I found out about this through doing some research and reading other blogs. There is an area where you can pull off the road to take photos and read the information provided. We learnt about how the returning servicemen were used to help build this road.
We stopped to take some photos on the way to Apollo Bay. When we got to Apollo Bay, it was raining, with the rain coming straight at us, so minimal photos taken.
We made it to the Twelve (although there aren’t 12 anymore) Apostles, with rapidly diminishing light and the rain coming down. One advantage was that there weren’t many people there at all and we pretty much had the place to ourselves. This meant that we could experiment with different settings. We quickly realised that we weren’t going to make Loch Ard Gorge this evening, so decided to get up early tomorrow morning instead to go to Loch Ard Gorge. These are the photos from the Twelve Apostles.
We stayed at Port Campbell overnight and had dinner at the hotel in town. Everyone we met was so welcoming. The food was beautiful with very generous servings.
Although this day was huge, we had so much fun exploring this beautiful, wild coastline. More of the Great Ocean Road tomorrow.
Bel and Phil's Adventures 
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