We left Melbourne yesterday.  I didn’t want to leave the hotel!  The next few days, we are going to be roughing it.  I keep referring to it as “camping” and Justin keeps telling me that I clearly don’t know what camping means.  I have to admit that Girl Scout troop 552 was more like troop Beverly Hills.

Anyway, while I packed up the hotel, Justin walked to pick up the rental car.  It’s really nice!  It is a Camry, and we think it’s brand new…..still has the new car smell!

We stopped at Shadowfax vineyard on our way out of Melbourne to do our first Australian wine tasting.  We really enjoyed trying all of the different wine and seeing how it compared to New Zealand.  One thing that we tried was sparkling Shiraz.  It was pretty good, but I don’t think that I could drink too much of it.  I can barely drink a whole glass of Champagne.

After that, we set off along the Great Ocean Road.  It’s a beautiful drive with many places to stop and take pictures.  The water is much more blue than New Zealand (which had more of a greenish hue).

It was a nice drive.  We even stopped for a little play time on the beach.

We stayed in Apollo Beach at the Beachfront Motel.  It was quite the contrast from what we left in Melbourne.  The bathroom MAY have been as big as the bathtub in Melbourne! But, it was fine for one night.

We are already on the road again to out next stop!

We continued to drive along the Great Ocean Road, stopping to take pictures of all the sights.

One of the coolest things that we saw, in my opinion, was koala bears in the wild!!  We were driving through an area with alot of trees on either side, and we noticed people pulled over on the side of the road, looking up, and taking pictures.  Of course, we pulled over and saw so many koala bears in the trees.  It was sooooo cool!!  We probably saw 10-20 of them!

We just got to our next stop, Mount Gambier.  The accommodation is really nice!  It’s called “The Barn.” Again, we are only here for one night.

They have a good steakhouse on the property.  That’s where we had dinner.  Justin had an enormous steak! He looks so happy……..

Tomorrow, we have a full day of wine tastings!  I’ll let you know how it goes!

XOXO Alyce

P.S.  I’m sorry that we missed posting for a few days.  These small towns don’t have good Internet service at all!  Not even 3G.  It’s driving me crazy.  We will do our best to keep posting on a consistent basis whenever we have good service!