Great Ocean Road!

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Hi! I've been putting this off because there is so much to say! After our wine tour, we stayed in the city in a hostel for the night and got up super early to go on our 3 day Great Ocean Road/Grampians tour. Our tour guide, Bernie, picked us up in the city around 7:30am. Once everyone was picked up, I realized we had a mini United Nations in our little bus. 3 Americans, 2 Brits, 2 Polish, 2 Spanish, 2 Japanese, 2 Filipino, 1 Italian, 2 Germans....I think that's it. It was a very mixed group. All of us were in our 20s except for the Filipino couple. They were 65 and 67...they were AMAZING! Some of the nicest people I've ever met. So, we got on our way.

We stopped quickly at the beach where the Rip Curl Pro was going on but if we wanted to get on the beach we had to pay $11 and we were going to stay for less than an hour anyways, so we took that time to have a quick breakfast and look around at the shops.

We stopped at the beginning of the Great Ocean Road (sooooo crowded, lots of tours) took a few pictures, and kept going. Bernie would stop every so often at spots he knew had good photo opportunities and let us take pictures for 10 minutes or so. We pulled to the side one time and looked up and saw koalas! There were a bunch of them and they were soooo cute. The Great Ocean Road is beautiful, the most picturesque place I've ever seen, not a bad view in sight.

We got to the 12 Apostles and ran over to check it out. It didn't disappoint, but so many people were there! We've decided to rent a car or something and see it for ourselves one morning when there aren't many people around. They are slowly disappearing though, because of the ocean rubbing against the rock constantly. There was a spot I could see where one of the rocks used to be and now it's gone 😞

We went on to London Bridge, which isn't actually a bridge anymore because the middle is gone out of it now. Then...we got caught in the rain! Heavy rain, that's for sure. We took our photos from under our jackets and ran to the bus. Bernie packed us up and started driving to our next destination, the Bay of Martyrs, then it started hailing for a little while! That stopped soon though, I just never thought I'd see hail in Australia. We were soaking wet, but the first thing we did was run down to the beach! It had stopped raining and the beach was beautiful! We could see the Bay of Islands from there and of course we had to have a photoshoot. The sand felt great, but the water was freezing! A couple times it surprised us because a small looking wave would come up and then it would hit us and we'd be all wet again! My pants were soaking wet again and I had to keep a hand on them to keep them from falling down haha. The last thing we saw was Bay of Islands and then we went on to our hostel in Warrnambool.

The hostel was cute, we all stayed in one room together, all bunk beds. I had a veggie burger, potatoes and salad for dinner (with a Strongbow of course...delicious!), took a shower, and got refreshed. We were all very tired and decided to turn in a bit early because we had another busy day of HIKING THE GRAMPIANS!!

I'll tell you about that in the next blog for organization's sake 😊 To view all of the photos I put in this blog, just click on one of the photos and click through the numbers at the top when the screen comes up, I put about 15 pictures on this blog so there are quite a few!

Love you all!
xoxo,
Amanda

(PS- Brenna, let me know if I missed anything!)

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Photos

us!
with our amazing tour guide bernie!

one of our photo stops
beautiful!

12 Apostles!
photos don't do it justice

koala sighting!!!
they're adorable

me at the bay of martyrs
notice the really wet pants

me and nichole!
love this girl!

Comments

[iva diva]

sooo pretty!
Wow the beach is beautiful! And you look great!