An Actual Vacation

It has been two days since I left the city and that awful hostel. I felt like those three days were the longest ever. Currently I am very content in a hotel room in a small town called Warrnambool along The Great Ocean Road. It is a super cute place and every town we have stopped at has had beautiful views. I don't think I have ever been this touristy. The entire drive we have stopped at nearly every lookout and tourist sign and taken a picture. I really don't want to miss anything big but after hours of doing that today I started to be okay with skipping some stops. I felt like I was taking so many pictures of the same thing. Even though every spot was gorgeous and I wanted to make it special- honestly its all just pretty beach. Yesterday we started our journey in traffic of course. It was SO nice to have a car though and even nicer to be in AC after being sweaty and hot for three days. The only downside to starting our trip Sunday was that I worked both Friday and Saturday night. Saturday I ended up staying up until around 6:45am, took at 'nap' and woke up at 9am to check out. 

After checking out we spent the morning and afternoon down at the Moomba festival again watching the Birdman Competition.....it was a very interesting event that loads of people turned out to see. It was sweltering out, probably like 95 F and people were hiding under anything that made shade along the river. The event basically consisted of people who create contraptions that are supposed to glide/fly.... they run off this stage and see who can get the furthest however most of them literally dropped right off the end of the stage and plopped into the water like a 10 year old off a diving board. But with their poorly designed crafts with or more accurately on top of them. So weird. I think the winner glided 20 meters or so. which I guess is far? Curse the US and not teaching metric! 

After the competition, which seriously dragged on, I met up with Andy again (the new Englishman who is my friend) and we walked around and grabbed lunch. After lunch, we said our goodbyes and Rob and I headed to pick up the car. 

Once on the road it took some serious getting used to to be on the left side of the road, and more then anything to be a passenger sitting on the left without driving. This is where we started our crazy tourist behavior. Everyone kept telling me that the road was soooo long and it would take sooo many hours. Um it wasn't. And actually most of the towns were pretty close together. We made it about half way to Apollo Bay where we literally followed a random sign that posted for backpackers to try and find a place to stay. We didn't book anything for this trip because we weren't sure where we were going to end up at any given time. SO it was 830 and we didn't have a place to stay...oopsy, but luckily we followed this sign which took us into a super local suburb type place, where a hostel that could be someones house was located. It must have been good luck or meant to be, because they only had two beds left! We took them and I actually ended up really liking the place. It was like staying in someones home, so relaxed, only a handful of people to hang out with, met some Aussies out back who had bbq'd and were very friendly. I wish I would have taken a picture of the place.Oh- side note at this point in the day I had literally been away for nearly 27 hours with only that two hour nap to go on. I was exhausted! So finally crashed out and apparently rob said there was a big spider in our room right before bed but he didn't say anything. Which is good because I wouldn't have been able to sleep. Without any prompting though I had already planned to sleep in my insect guard sleeping slip thingy. Made me feel very validated in my purchase and clearly it kept mr. spidy away from me. 

All that happened in ONE day. Seriously the longest day ever. Then today we woke up, didn't get to spend much time in Apollo Bay and we may go back and revisit on the way back and headed on the road. I was cranky this morning. Poor Rob does not get morning Thea yet. he tried to comment on how I seemed less tired after being away for 27 hours then how tired I was in the morning. I snapped at him that duh, its morning and I hate waking up. I was not nice for the first like hour. So much stopping today. Again, every lookout, everything the little tourist map told us we did. Some of it was super cool, the 12 Apostles was awesome, saw some cool light houses, check facebook in a couple days for photos of everything. We were going to stop in this town called Port Campbell which everyone talked about as being great. I thought it smelled like cow shit and there were flies everywhere. not my favorite place. We had lunch and then kept going. We drove down a beautiful endless road for a while which was fun into some forest before just giving up and turning around because we needed gas. I got to see a real life Kangaroo or possibly a Wallaby jump out on that road which was awesome, followed by later seeing REAL Koalas in their natural habitat off the side of the road. SO COOL! Also, worth a giggle but as we were leaving the National Otway Park, our car got stopped by a massive herd of cows. I mean huge. it was totally like in the movies! I thought it was so funny I took about 10 pictures to try to convey to you all just how ridiculous it was to have traffic stopped for this herd and how funny it was. 

After all that excitement I took a small nap in the car before getting to our little town now. We ended up staying in a hotel because it wasn't much more expensive and again didn't really plan very well. It is actually quite nice. We had a lovely dinner in town, probably the best I have had since getting to Australia and now I really need to get to bed. We are hoping to finish up the road tomorrow, then start backtracking and doing all the things we missed or didn't feel like the first time. We have until Thursday and I must tell you I don't really want to go back to the city, I love the coastal town vibe. I will update in probably another couple days to let everyone know more fun stuff I do. Love you :)