Spring Break part 2: the great ocean road tour

i forgot to mention it in part 1:
we went to this place called the docklands. it's another little tourist place with shops. it has a huge ferris wheel in the center of it and that's the way to know you are in the docklands.
now on to part 2...

friday was by far the highlight of the break. we went on the great ocean road tour. this is a tour of a road that was built and it goes from melbourne to adelaide. it is a road that is surprisingly based on the pacifc coast highway in california. i thought that was pretty cool cause i actually knew what that was. it is an all day tour. the tour leaves at like 7 and we come home around 7 or so. so you better be ready to be gone all day and be ready for a lot of driving and history.
so we got up at 5:45, this was not the fun part. we got breakfast and we went to a hotel to be picked up. when we got there we thought we had missed it, and apparently we had. the time online was different than the time on the ticket, so we called the people and we said that we got confused and luckily the guide was still in the area and he swung by again and picked us up. after that little bump in the road we were on our way.
while we were on this tour, our guide (who's name was neil) gave us a good balance between music and him telling us about the history of the road and the places we were going to. our first stop was the arch that is dedicated to the men of WWI and the men who died in the war. it was pretty awesome. we stopped and took pictures and went out on the beach and stayed there for about an hour.
after that we stopped somewhere on the beach to have our morning tea. oh and that's another thing that has happened on this trip-i'm starting to become more of a tea drinker. with sugar and milk that is...just like my mom with coffee.
anyway, after that we drove by a house that survived the 1983 bush fires, and it is now a B&B going at around 6,000 a night. after driving by the house, we drove by a long sight of koala homes, which are trees. you can tell they are the koala homes because all the leaves are gone. and sometimes if you look hard enough you can see a few. we drove into the homes and i was the first one on the bus to see a real koala. it was cuddled on a tree branch sleeping-i didn't get a picture cause it was so fast, but it was so cute. we then stopped and got out of the car and we saw a few more wild koalas.
after that we stopped for lunch and i had fish n chips, aussie style. they were pretty good, but i still prefer the british version :) after lunch we went to a real rain forest and we saw the second tallest tree (second to the redwood) in the world. we did a walk through the rain forest and we learned a few more things about the different trees and plants and how they've been there. some had been there since the dino times, so they were pretty old.
after the rain forest, we went to the second most photographed place in australia: the 12 apostles. this was beautiful. they are basically rocks in the water, but this water is so blue and these rocks are so big that they match so beautifully. we spent about a hour there and neille and i took pictures the whole time. they are some of the most beautiful things i have seen in australia.
after we went to the place called the loch and gorche. this was a place where a famous ship wreck happened and 2 people survived. think titanic without the love story-at least that was how the guide described it. this was also a cool place cause the water again was so blue, however it was very cold. wind was blowing and it was hard to take pictures of us without our hair getting in our faces. but it was all worth it.
the last place on our tour was the london bridge. the london bridge is a group of rocks where the middle of them collapsed in 1990. funny story: so the middle of the rocks crashed while there was a tour group on the island and 2 people got caught on the inner part. so the rest of the tour group called for help, while they called for help the news got wind of this story and flew a helicopter to the island and tried to get an interview with the man and woman that were stuck on the island. they refused to give an interview and they were flown away by a rescue team. the news station couldn't figure out why they didn't want to give an interview, and they decided to do research. after doing research they found out that the man had called in sick to work that day and the woman was his mistress not his wife. they didn't want to give the interview cause they ran the risk of getting caught. :) the end. also near the london bridge there was a penguin colony, but they only came out at night, and so they weren't there.
that was the end of out day on the great ocean road. we drove and got some dinner and then drove 4 hours back to melbourne. we arrived home around 9 pm. it was a long day, but it was worth it.