Horsham to Princetown

Thursday, November 13, 2014

After this eventful day, being towed and searching for geocaches, we have a less eventful day, but a very pleasant one anyway. We leave at 9 am after a quick wash and a delightful breakfast with fresh kiwi fruit.  We stop at the Giant Koala at Dadswells Bridge on the way for some pictures and drive on to Stawell.

The Giant Koala

Next stop is Halls Gap in the Grampians, our main attraction for the day.  Since it still is quite warm we enjoy an ice cream in the sunshine, accompanied by a magpie and a duck who eagerly fight over a few crumbs.

Halls Gap

We leave a 12pm and have a great trip through the rest of the Grampians with beautiful views on both sides.  There was no way we could stop along the roadside to take pictures, so the following photographs have been taken from inside the van:

The Grampians tourist route

We are heading for Warrnambool on the coast and from then on the Great Ocean Road to Princetown.  We’re not in need of lunch as our ice cream was big enough to last us a while.

We stop at the Grotto, London Bridge and The Arch, part of the Bay of Islands Coastal Park, for some picture perfect views of the ragged coastline and limestone cliffs. 

Great Ocean Road

I took a moment to ring my friends in Melbourne to see if they would be okay with a visit some time the following week, and found out the address of another friend in Melbourne who we now are also planning to visit.

Eventually we arrive at Princetown Camping Reserve (#681 - S 38 41 55, E 143 09 35), our rest stop for the night.  We book for one night initially and will extend if we feel the need for it.

The campground is relatively expensive for the little it has to offer and, although there are hours set aside for cleaning, we have not seen any evidence of it.  The laundry, with washing machine and dishwashing amenities is downright dirty with bird poop all over the bench and sink.  All we do there is getting our hot water to take to the camp kitchen where we do our washing up.  An American girl told us that she was very unhappy with this campground and she had read a lot of negative comments on the web. She was not wrong! At the camper we are surrounded by little wrens, one of them a beautiful blue one, but they are hard to get a picture of.

Hard to see: a blue wren on the fence

I ring Kevin to see how they are going and after dinner we watch a DVD as there is no TV reception.

Friday, November 14, 2014

As yesterday was a rather long day driving from Horsham to Princetown we are having a pyjama day.  I spend my time with sudoku, a few games on the tablet and reading, as I find my current book very interesting.  

Towards lunch time I went for a shower, a nice hot one, and went to the office to pay for another night.  I also asked where we could fill up drinking water, but there was none! Just as well we had enough left to get us through another day...  

At the office I met a Dutch young man and later at the camp kitchen, where we had just cooked our dinner on the BBQ, a lot of German young men came in to cook their dinner.  We spent a lot of time talking to them.  They all came from Bavaria and were planning on stayingin Australia for several months, but had already run into bad luck with their newly bought camper having broken down.  They now had a rental, but hoped to get their own back soon.  They also hoped to find work to be able to stay as long as they’d planned for.

I went out to take a few pictures of the kangaroos that had descended upon us, first around the campground, later in the middle of the oval.  I’d counted at least 50, but there could have easily been more.  Two of the males were constantly fighting.  A funny thing to watch as it luckily wasn’t very violent.  I think a young male was more or less put into his place.  

Kangaroos at Princetown Camping Reserve

Today I rang Stephen and was happy to hear everything was okay, so will try and keep up with regular phone calls with the boys just to touch base and hear their voices.

We watched another DVD and had an early night, as you do on the road...