Tank Commander Rick

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Tim and Myself, got up vaguely early, to pick up the car from town. We'd reserved a huge, in fact monsterous, Nissan X-Trail 4WD, which I was rather worryingly going to have to drive mostly, cause Chris is under 25 and Tim hadn't driven for 7 years - joy.

Anyway, we managed to navigate through the city, dodgying the trams, and only narrowly missing running a cyclist off the road - Melbourne streets can get rather busy. I'd spoken, to the taxi driver on the drunken journey home last night about our little trip and he'd told me the journey to the 12 Apostels would take around 2/3 hours, so we all packed in the tank in our shorts and t-shirts and headed off around 10ish with the sun blazing. Spirits were high, as The Proclaimers CD made its second appearance on one of my road-trips, and pretty soon we were all singing along -

..and I would walk 500 miles, and I would walk 500 more...

It took us 5 hours to get there.




The weather had turned nasty, and, although Great Ocean Road is beautiful, the occasional bouts of torrential rain made driving the winding roads a tad scary and visibility poor. We finally made it to the 12 Apostels, (now 11, since one fell into the sea a few years ago), at around 3 o'clock, with the rain still drizzling and the wind helping to supply a near-freezing temperature. All the other visitors seem to have had insider information about the weather, and brought with them anoraks, woolly hats and scarfs, and we looked rather out of place in our shorts, T's and sun glasses.

We ventured out into the wet gales, hugging ourselves to keep warm, whilst trying desperately to not look bothered. On wandering down the path down to the viewing platform we spotting a huge bullet ant on the path on the way down, which caused some considerable excitment.

We took the mandatory photos, looked at each other shivering and soggy, wondering what to do next, then headed back to the car and set off home.

I know, I know, we'd driven for 5 hours, spent less than 5 mins at our destination, then started the 5 hour journey back.

11 huge rocks sitting proudly just off the coast are cool, but really do have limited appeal.

An Ant the size of your thumb though? Now that's cool.

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