A week in and around Melbourne and The Great Ocean Road 2023

We're spending the UK summer in Australia during their winter. We've travelled light each with 15kg of checked luggage and 7kg of hand luggage. We've packed for both winter and for summer.

I visited Melbourne with child 3 in 2019, I wanted to show Peter some of the things I'd enjoyed 4 years earlier, but also wanted to have new experiences to share together. We packed a lot in, in the week and hardly stopped.

We started our trip in Melbourne where we had the first 3 days in the city to adjust to the 9 hour time difference, eating and sleeping when we felt like it. We explored Melbourne and walked around 25 miles over two days, visiting Fitzroy Gardens, the MCG and The Botanical Gardens for the light show on our last evening.

The Yarra at night

Why they brought James Cooks parents cottage over from Yorkshire, brick by brick, I'll never know. he never lived in it.

Fairy Tree

The docklands at 6am

We explored the street art graffiti in AC/DC lane and surrounding area, visited the Opal museum and enjoyed a variety of meals with plenty of coffee shops.

We hired a car and drove to Philip Island to visit the Koala Conservation and watch the Penguin Parade as the Fairy Penguins come into shore from a days fishing at sunset. We stayed in Cowes for the night.

We then drove to Colac for the night stopping in St Kilda for lunch. We stayed in a motel that looked like there would be a chalk line of a body, but turned out to be the cleanest hotel room we'd stayed in for a long time. it was spotless.

We then hit The Great Ocean Road and visited The Twelve Apostles and stopped at Cape Otway to discover the lighthouse's lenses were made in the 1850's by a company that are located just down the road from our house in the UK. 

Sadly the Great Ocean Road was down to one lane in many areas, due to subsidence

The Twelve Apostles

Cape Otway Lighthouse

Regardless of the weather, we're Brits, we'll go on the beach

We spent a night in Lorne at a caravan park and the last day was spent stopping where we fancied for coffee and lunch.

Car hire returned and airport hotel checked into before our early morning departure to The Whitsunday Islands for a week.

Peter still hasn't seen a Kangaroo and this is his second trip to Australia. He did see a Wallaby though. Peter is convinced Kangaroos are imaginary animals, like unicorns.