So on the off chance at least one of you is wondering where I've been for the last few days, my family and I have been on a holiday to Port Fairy. The only way to describe it is to call it an...experience =D.
Port Fairy is beautiful, although 592km away (7 hours in the car) is just a little bit too far =P. It was weird being there in a way though, because the last time I'd been there was exactly ten years ago to the very week, when we weren't even living in Australia and were just on holiday =D.
So the holiday was great, but there were certain events that made it standout. Like having $25 fish and chips, (way too expensive!) walking on an amazing beach, seeing 35 koalas on a small stretch of road and watching tourists block the road with their cars while they took pictures, driving ages up a road and paying $45 to see what we thought was the lighthouse from Round the Twist but in the end just wasn't (we have been to the actual lighthouse before though), passing a pine plantation so big it stretched further than we could see to either side and took us half an hour to get past even at 110km/h, and accidentally reprogramming the sat-nav lady to tell us detours on our route =D.
Driving on the Great Ocean Road + Dire Straits = HEAVEN. We drove along this road for a few hours to Apollo Bay (another place we stayed ten years ago) to recreate a picture we took on our first visit there. The Great Ocean Road should really be renamed The Great Road though, because as well as going alongside the ocean it also took us through a rainforest and over some hills =D.
But the real fun began when we decided to drive two hours to Halls Gap in the Grampians. Mum and Dad stayed there a few years ago and it's home to a wicked mini-golf course. We had to play on it, so we went to visit. Upon entering the Grampians, however, and still about half an hour from Halls Gap, we were met with an unpleasant surprise. Scroll to the bottom of this post to see what it was. (sorry about the bad editing)
Yup. A plague. Grasshoppers everywhere. That photo was taken once we arrived at Halls Gap, where you couldn't see the floor because of all the grasshoppers. There must have been millions, because they were on every surface available (including us) as well as flying through the air. So no mini-golf, but Dad and I did have to spend ten minutes cleaning out the car's vents so that we wouldn't overheat on the way home. And then we had to do it again once we'd got out of the Grampians. Even after thoroughly cleaning the car back at Port Fairy, we found grasshoppers in the garage the next morning. There's still some inside the wheels =D.
So, a pretty rare occasion, right? Wrong. There was a grasshopper plague at Tailem Bend today too, although not anywhere near as bad. So we've got to clean the car again =D. We ended up playing mini golf at Port Fairy, which was still pretty good =P.
Driving nearly 2000km in five days has taken its toll though, so rant over =D. Below are some pictures - hopefully they attach in the order that I list them here so that I don't look like an idiot.
1. The Bay of Port Fairy, as seen from the top of Griffiths Island.
2. Our car after 30 minutes of intense grasshopper attack. We're unlucky in that we can't think of a single car that has a larger grille than ours =P
