Sonja & Ian's Excellent Travel Adventures - Great Ocean Road & Warrnambool

Since arriving at the Grampians numerous days ago we’ve been without internet access. It always amazes me, when this sort of thing happens, just how dependent I have become on the cyber world. It’s really quite crazy and I sometimes wonder what would happen if the World-Wide-Web were to vanish one day. Well, it hasn’t (yet) and I haven’t updated this blog for over a week, so it’s time to put my fingers to the keyboard.

Leaving Lorne on a cool but lovely Sunday morning we drove along the most amazingly beautiful road that one could surely find anywhere in the world – The Great Ocean Road! Although the glimpses we caught of the rugged coastline as we made our way to Warrnambool were very impressive, the world we encountered the following day when we returned to explore it’s spectacular limestone rock formations, simply left us speechless. As I still cannot find appropriate words to describe the extraordinary scenery that spread before our eyes I’ll just have to let the photos speak for themselves. Sadly as Ian was having another one of his shocking bad back days we were restricted to merely enjoying the spectacular sights from the various ocean lookouts. Even then his inability to walk further than a few meters made most of the viewing platforms impossible for him to reach. I, however, trotted from lookout to lookout, soaking up every moment of this extraordinary experience. Despite the rather cool and overcast weather, I absolutely loved it and had an amazing and truly memorable day.

 

 

The weather, having been unpredictable from the moment we set out on this trip, surprised us with brilliant sunshine and mild temperatures the following morning. As Ian’s back was behaving itself a little better that morning, we decided to use this opportunity to get in a bit of exercise.

Warnambool, like so many Victorian towns, has a number of “rail trails” (disused railway lines that have been converted to cycle paths) of varying length. The one that caught Ian’s eye was the 37 km trail that links Warnambool with the historic townships of Koroit and Port Fairy. Ian frequently takes 60+ km rides back home. But as I haven’t ridden my bike in months (biking not being one of my passions!) he realised what was blatantly obvious to me that a 74 km was out of the question. We figured, however, that if we drove to Koroit we’d only have to peddle half that distance and since most rail trails are fairly flat, I agreed. Although it was rather lovely, sunny day we soon noticed a consistently blowing headwind slowing our progress quite considerably. This wasn’t on the program and I could be heard to puff every 5 kms (or so): “ARE WE THERE YET?” Finally, after what seemed like hours, we arrived in Port Fairy, found some life in the center of town (which otherwise was as dead as a doornail) and had a pleasant lunch.

 

I can’t pretend that I was excited about getting back on my bike after having spent an hour or so of feeding my face at Port Fairy. My legs seemed to have seized up whilst stationary and immediately started protesting. Ian, the experienced rider, assured me that his legs were tired also; that this was a normal byproduct of sitting down for a while after a longish ride and that the pain would subside after a couple of kms. LIAR!!

Whilst we’d been having lunch the temperature had somehow risen to 33 degrees C, the wind had picked up even more and was now blowing harder than ever …. straight into our faces! This was definitely not on the program and I suffered. My knees were creaking, my calves complaining and my thighs were absolutely screaming. I was huffing and puffing like an ancient locomotive and got slower and slower and slower still. It wasn’t too long before I knew without doubt that unless the wind was going to change direction (quickly!) I wasn’t going to make it. Well, to cut a long and painful story short the wind didn’t change direction and I didn’t make it. To my everlasting shame I conceded defeat after covering half the distance (with much moaning and groaning). My darling husband (or should I say my murderous husband, for after all this was HIS idea!) graciously rode his bike back to where we’d parked the car and came back to collect the sore bundle of misery that was me.

It’s actually really rather funny. The day before I was leaping about the Great Ocean Road like a mountain goat whilst my hubby could barely muster a step. This day I was grinding along the bike trail at 0.01 km an hour whilst the very same ‘sorry’ husband was flying along on his bike. Go figure!!

To be continued....