Author: rogerluedtke

A beautiful Easter Sunday started with an acai breakfast bowl…

and excellent coffee at the Icaro WholeFood Cafe, across the street from our hotel. It had an Ashland Oregon vibe.

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First stop was up a steep hill to the Mariner’s Lookout for a great morning view of Apollo Bay.

On the way back through town we had to stop for a pic of these cool trees along the beach. My identifier says it’s a Monterey Cypress.

Then on to the Maits Rainforest Walk, which wowed us. The size of the trees, the huge fern trees, and the Hobbit-like surroundings for us bested the Ho rainforest in the Olympics. I’ll try to to be selective with the photos.

Mountain Ash

We moved on to the Cape Otway Lighthouse. Along the way I saw the white flash of color of this bird, but didn’t see the flashy blue until we had stopped.

It posed for a long time, but failed to see anything funny, apparently.

We went on to the Cape Otway Lighthouse. The lighthouse was certainly picturesque…

and, as with so many sites here, the surrounding unfamiliar foliage was quite appealing to us, and will be included quite often.

A particular treat was just getting from one place to another, with the branches of unfamiliar beautiful trees providing a canopy over the road.

Took us awhile to get to the next place, the Otway Fly Treetop Walk, which was in a very commercial place with a zipline, kitchy enchanted forest, and other popular attractions, but which had a wildly elevated canopy walkway that also wowed us.

The “paths” were at least 200 feet off of the ground…

and there was a tower that went up an extra hundred…

and gave birds’ eye views of those below…

Not for the faint-hearted (or acrophobic) was a cantilevered stretch that suspends you…

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and gently sways you, just for the fun of it, apparently.

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I indulged in a souvenir cap in the gift shop because I mistakenly thought I had lost mine. Anyway, it will be a conversation starter.

After lunch in the restaurant here (our market-bought sandwiches with a token squirt and coffee), we spent a couple of hours doing stops and hikes in the 12 Apostles National Park – 8 gorgeous golden sea stacks (4 crashed spectacularly in 2009), off shore from cliffs of the same limestone. Again I’ll try to be selective.

We then had a longish drive to our hotel in Port Fairy, nearly meeting our demise when a car waiting on a side-road inexplicably drove out into our path after coming to a stop. Fortunately, the driver must have taken the trouble to look our way before getting too far out. I was able to swerve around its hood, thanks in part to the wide wheelbase of our zippy little turquoise MG runabout.

Re it, I think its choice for us may have been deliberate by the Melbourne airport Avis. Ninety-five percent of the cars here are white, grey, or black. Of the thousands we’ve seen to date, none came close in color to ours. Ideal for seniors in parking lots.

We had dinner in Port Fairy at a Tuscan place, outside, huddled next to an umbrella heater because there was no inside seating thanks to the Easter crowds.

Dana is itching to get on the Great Ocean Road so I’ll make this quick.

Looooong plane ride (16 hours)….

what to do after dinner and 6 hours sleep? Games on the iPhone, which I thoughtfully loaded in SFO. Meditation and medication (Aleve PM and NoJetLag), unannounced midnight snack (which we didn’t discover until 2 hours before breakfast), making notes of the little events to date for later blogging.

Wonderfully fluent arrival and entry – only glitch being having to declare the tubed shot meds, leading to a nonsensical (maybe token) standing in line to be sniffed by a dog – twice. Fun detail, the dog stopped at the thermos D was holding, only for a second, and then proceeded to sniff her hands and lap thoroughly, and went on, then on the second round repeated the whole thing. He did not do that to me or anyone else.

We got the rental car and then D connected with Siri to get us en route for our next night stay at Apollo Bay…

first stop the Great Ocean Road Chocolaterie, where we joined hundreds of Aussie families and other tourists for an Easter Saturday sugar overload.

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There was an Easter Bunny doing selfies with families, a huge Easter egg hunt, a little menagerie of Aussie animals, including these little guys (have to get the name later):

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We moved on to the Anglesea Golf club, famed for kangaroos on the course – these actually on the driving range.

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Then a long detour mistake through Otway National Park gravel roads, aborted by a friendly dirt bike rider who got us back on the GOR, to Aireys Inlet where these 1975 refugees from East Timor (along with many others along the GOR) were surf fishing:

Then a somewhat spectacular lighthouse on the headland in the background…

Then Erskine Falls, from the upper viewpoint…

and lower viewpoint.

the latter involving a cardiac risk descent and climb.

Then, after some misdirection, a lovely walk along the Kennet River Nature Trail, with its gorgeous Aussie trees…

resident wild kangaroos…

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and the highlight…

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a wild (really) koala, who had his own way of descending.

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Then along the GOR (dead wringer for the southern Oregon coast) and then on to the Apollo Bay Motel for the night (as mundane as it sounds, but with an excellent restaurant across the street where we managed to get the only available table, outside on a chilly night huddled next to burner). Huge pile of excellent spicy black mussels for me.

Then to the room, with a feeble attempt at blogging, by me broken by two or three sudden lapses into unconsciousness, like a general anesthetic response, rather than just dozing off – D had done the same in the car earlier.

April 17, Thursday: I’m writing this at 5am on Easter Sunday, April 20 (which I believe is at noon in PDX on Saturday). Doing it on my iPhone, because my iPad is in the hands of Fedex, on its way to the Mayfair hotel in Adelaide (thanks to our sterling neighbor, Evan Martin), where I hope to reconnect with and apologize to it for leaving it behind after so diligently remembering all 200-300 of the other trip prep things necessary for this odyssey.

Despite the length of that sentence, this will be a shortened post, using snippets because of my bad and worsening thumb typing skills. So….

• the bulk of time in our last ditch prep was spent on exhausting alternatives for getting Dana’s migraine medicine shot to the Cairns area for her early May injection -it needs refrigeration. Solution: a small thermos with a cooling gel tube that we carry with us and rerefrigerate every night. Daunting challenge to our aging memories. OK, have to shorten these.
• 4:10 pickup by our airport transfer angel Janet Harbert – 10 minutes early, thankfully, since we hit a 1 & 1/2 hour delay on I205, arriving after 5:30 – likely Easter weekend crunch
• slick checkin at PDX despite the need to do a counter check due to the Aus ETA (google it); cool United Guatemalan kid expedited it in a kiosk, the thermos passed TSA-pre without even an eyebrow raised
• at the gate, I noticed the iPad missing, texted Evan who sprang into action – too late to get it to PDX because of the traffic snarl
• flight delayed, due to prior flight crew having also been delayed by the snarl,
• huge pre-boarding by Easter weekend commuting K1 frequent flyers from the Silicon Forest to their homes in Silicon valley.
• very pleasant, calming, restorative 15 minutes in the Polaris Lounge in SFO
• opulent multi-course bus class dinner at about 9 pm
• relearned how to use the power buttons to convert our pods into sleepers
• I accepted the FA offer of pjs (seriously) but couldn’t bring myself to use them
• quickly crashed

April 18, Friday: lost at the International Date Line. Don’t ask for an explanation – I don’t understand it.