We enjoyed our "free" breakfast this morning and then headed for some real coffee or at least it was espresso. I got a kick out of ordering an iced mocha with extra ice only to discover their iced mochas don't normally come with ice. Once again, another bad assumption in a country where I've found things just aren't always as logical as I might wish.
The weather today was rainy and very overcast to the point of being foggy in sections. We decided that based on that, we might as well do the inland drive to the other end of the Great Ocean Road today because it wasn't going to be conducive to short hikes and sightseeing.
We skirted Melbourne, and then stopped for lunch in Geelong. The lunch was excellent and we wandered around the Geelong waterfront for a bit and then hopped back into the car. From there we headed pretty much due west and saw cows, sheep, cows and sheep, and sheep and cows. It was kilometers and kilometers of pastureland. What was puzzling was the pastures were semi-separated by lines of trees that had been obviously planted a large number of years ago. I'm only guessing that the trees were meant to separate the properties as there didn't seem to be rhyme or reason to much of their placement.
I was profoundly disappointed that in all those hours of driving we did not see a single kangaroo except for a few who had found their close encounter with a vehicle to be their last unfortunate moment. We did finally see a mob of them in the evening near Cape Bridgewater, but I was surprised that was the only time we saw them since I see them at least half the time on the way to work and here we were in absolutely prime grazing land.
We ended our day in Portland of all places. I guess people long ago did not have much in the way of imagination as they seemed wont to use the same names for many places. At least we'd passed through some places with much more interesting names like Warrnambool and Bolwarra. You just don't find those towns all over the world now, do you?
We found a place to stay for the night and then took off for Cape Bridgewater which was supposed to have a seal colony. To my great disappointment we didn't find the seals. We thought we saw some penguins at one point, but it turned out to be some well-fed cormorants. Drat!
We drove around the port in Portland and it looks like Portland ships out a lot of grain and who knows what else. One of the ships appears to have been a fish processing ship as there must have been 8 stories of lighted levels.
Tomorrow we start the Great Ocean Road and with any luck the weather will be an improvement on what we had today.
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