Day 4 - Just a rainy day

Woke up nice and snug in our cabin. We had a cereal breakfast and took a stroll into Apollo Bay for some chicken. I apparently forgot to pack what we were making for dinner so we needed to pick that up in case we got back late. It was raining while we strolled through the town.

We headed back to our cabin for a quick bite to eat and then back in the car to Otway National Park. We wanted to go to the tip and see the lighthouse. My mom was on the lookout for wild animals so she did her best to ignore Lilly who was trying to get her to sing songs and play games. This would come back to haunt her later when she turned down Lilly's game of Santa Claus. I couldn't begin to tell you how to play or what went wrong but Lilly refused to hang out with grandma later in the day because of it!

Anyway, when we turned off The Great Ocean Road we turned our attention to the trees. There were signs everywhere for koalas. Mom suddenly said "I think I saw a koala!" So we backed up quite a ways and got out. Sure enough, there was one in a tree. Someone else pulled over after seeing us looking up. They spotted another one. After looking up at these two koalas and taking 38 pictures of them, we discovered there were about 12 koalas right above our head. So we walked around taking another 42 pictures including a mother and her baby. Most of the koalas didn't move (they sleep apporximately 16 hours a day) but a few moved to different branches.

Back to the car we headed down to the Cape Otway Lightstation. We checked out the visitor center and saw the price for entry. We wondered around the gift shop for a bit and all wondered out of the building. We were all a little surprised at how much it cost to just tour the area around the lighthouse!

We loaded into the car and tried to decide where to go. We figured we would do a big loop and end up back in Apollo Bay. Seth wanted to go see this Otway Fly and it was part of the loop. There were times on our GPS that the road looked like it was dirt but we figured it wouldn't be a big deal.

We drove for about 40 minutes and came upon the signs for the Otway Fly. Had to walk another 15 minutes to get to the visitor center. We then found out the cost to see this was more than the lighthouse but we had driven all this way, we were going to see something! Seth had told us this was some sort of boardwalk so I pictures a boarded path through the woods. Wrong answer! It was a metal structure that went through the trees, and way off the ground!

The path started off just along a dirt path. There were information markers along the way talking about different types of trees and the area. Next was a dinosaur area but I am not real sure why they included this in here. Then you turn onto a metal walkway. I'm not keen on heights but the walk was pretty cool. It took you very high up and you in some areas it was hard to figure out how high you were cause the undergrowth was so big.

Then there was the tower. Again, the height didn't freak me out, it was the swaying of the tower that sent me into a small panic attack. I made it down without incident. The path wound through the woods for quite sometime. It was getting dark by the time we got back on the dirt path. It was apparently time for the park to close. We got picked up by a ranger on a gold cart and taken back to the visitor center.

There was the ride home that I really wish we had a video of. I drove and my hands hurt when we got back from gripping the wheel so hard. The road didn't turn out to be dirt but then again, the GPS had no idea where we were. I don't think we really knew where we were either. The road was incredibly curvy and most of the time was only one lane. Then there were the drops on the side, who knew we were up in the hills? It was dark, raining, and then the fog came. No wonder our GPS said it was going to take 4 hours to get back to the cabin at that point, the speed limit was 20 kph.

The night ended with a puzzle, dinner and a movie. Not too bad!