Heading out of Adelaide we stopped at Mount Gambier for th night, which looked like a cute place to sleep and after a couple nights in the hostel, with the noise every night we were due for a nice hotel and good dinner. We went to a great Thai restarurant which I fount in lonely planet and found out it was doing so well it moved to a larger location. Once we found it we sat down waiting for ok Thai food and got amazing thai food. Bit pricy but delicious! Great food, great sleep and we headed out in the morning to explore the cute town where we drove out to a lake, which was hard to see it was raining of course... then we went to the sinkhole which is much cooler looking than it sounds. Beautiful gardens in it, and I guess I should tell this story since Ray would have if he wrote this. I slipped on a rock, fell on my knee a little, but mostly on my hand which was holding the umbrella and the metal wire that sticks out stuck into my hand. Of course I have to have the first tumble or scar of the trip. Alright moving on....
After a good time other than my slipped we headed out towards the Great Ocean Road. As we drove we realized Australia is flat and looks about the same for hours. We hit the beginning of the road and it got nicer to look at. There is a turnoff every 5 minutes during the first section of the road, so we drove, got out, drove, got out, then it really started to rain and we drove more than got out. It was pretty cool, big cliffs, big ocean, lots of tourists all of a sudden. We thought we would stop for the night about half way down which was a small town, but very cute, after some inquiries we realized all of Melbourne and surrounding areas were on a long weekend because of The Melbourn Cup. Did not know what this was all about but it is a huge deal, horse racing is big here except noone goes to teh race they just use the excuse to take time off work. This made rooms really expensive and not readily available so we decided to keep drivning. Not the best idea, got dark, rainy and the next town was even more touristy, not a room available in sight. We actually had to sleep in the car. After a restless, cold, sore cat nap, we made our way down the rest of the road and towards Melbourne in hopes of some sleep and a warm room.
We reached Melbourne and found a hotel just outside of Melbourne, far away from the race coming up and decided to stay in for the night, sleep, eat and rest since sleeping the night befor was pretty rough for us old folks. We haved move on towards Sydney now along the south coast and found the same problem on Phillip Isand with room availability so saw the Koala sanctuary and did a short drive, and walk and headed off the Island and moved on. We are in Sale now, resting up for another day of kangaroo scouting and driving.
