Great Ocean Road and a Great Big Drive

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Left at 7am to motor it to Adelaide! Tried our first taste of sleeping in the back - don't tell anyone! Driving via the Great Ocean Road so the first stop was Bell's Beach or 'Point Break' and world surf championship fame! Very surfy. THe road along the coast is very windy and very near cliffs but not too scary - I've been scareder in Wales. In parts it's really low as well and feels as though the sea might lap at the road at high tide. We stopped at a couple of random little towns (good bacon and egg sandwich at Wye River - we're connoisseurs now we've had so many!)
Next stop was the Twelve Apostles at Port Campbell - ok there's only really 9 of them (one fell down about 2 days later actually) but they're still pretty cool. I'm sure I learnt about this in Geography - waves make a cave, roof of cave falls down so you get lots of rock stacks in the sea - anyway, these are really pretty ones, rising out of a dark blue crashing sea.
Next step after that was Warrmanool which has a bay which is used by whales as a nursery. At first we thought the big black things that were really close with waves crashing round were just rocks but then we started to see fins and tails and spray!
Driving this far isn't at all bad with 3 people - we swapped every 2 hours so you get longer not driving than driving, you have all your stuff with you, you could lie down properly if you wanted (I should point out it is illegal to not be seat belted in...), you could stop as often or as little as you wanted and the driving is genuinely fun! However, I have to admit, as dusk fell, I woosed out of driving due to the wombat incident, which dave and pete still haven't let me forget. I did get us over the South Australia border though!
Pete drove through some horrendous rain while I huddled in a sleeping bag with HP and a torch. We stopped in Kingston SE (that's SE not OM - that's important) for dinner which seemed to be deserted but apparently everyone in the entire town was in the pub that we went to. After a lovely dinner we decided we could still make it to Adelaide for a reasonable time. That was, until the engine didn't start. It didn't even turn over. We hadn't left the lights on and the battery seemed to be ok in every other way but it just wouldn't do anything when you turned the key. It was cold, wet and dark and if we slept there a load of drunk people were going to come out of the pub to the site of our not exactly discrete van. With a bit of effort we managed to direct Wicked's roadside assistance to Kingston OM. About half an hour later we managed to direct Wicked's roadside assistance to Kingston SE. About half an hour later the van started without any problems. After many expletives and a bit of hysterical laughing we cancelled the assistance and plowed on to Adelaide. We pulled up about 200k south of Adelaide feeling villified that we would have made it if we hadn't broken down 😊

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