Great Ocean Road - sea, storms, kangaroo, and our first koala!

The Great Ocean Road lived up to its name, being great in distance, views, and weather. We picked up our car at the Melbourne Airport and took off for the GOR driving on the left side of the road. Fortunately, I have driven many times on the left, but after driving 12k miles across the US on our road trip, it took me a bit of time to get reacquainted with driving on the “wrong” side of the road. 😀

The first day, we drove as far as the quaint town of Lorne, but we bypassed the town to drive a while longer in hopes of seeing some wildlife like kangaroos, and maybe a koala bear. Unfortunately, the weather started to turn ugly and soon we had some serious rain and wind, along with a bit of hail. Like Melbourne, the weather on the South coast of Australia can change in a few minutes as we experienced throughout the day.

The scenery reminded us of Highway 1 (the Pacific Coast Highway) along the West Coast of the US. Tight, winding roads, mountains, but this time the expansive Tasman sea. After many hours of driving, we headed up a road to a golf course that reportedly has a lot of kangaroos... they were correct. We saw at least 20 of the big guys lounging around the golf course. We found out that kangaroos are primarily nocturnal and spend most of the day just lazing around. So, mostly we just saw kangaroo laying along the fairways, twitching their ears and probably laughing at us, as we eagerly waited for them to hop around.

We continued our drive out to the part of the road that starts to head more West, but as we were getting close to turning around to go back to Lorne, we spotted something crossing the road. The local in front of us slowed down as well to have a look. What we thought was a dog ended up being a full grown, large koala bear!!! It walked across the main road, down a bit and up into a pine tree. Not sure why it was there and the locals we talked to weren’t sure either. No matter why he or she was there, it was amazing to see a koala bear in the wild or at least close to the wild!! 😀 Jos was so excited, she mistakenly didn’t oress record while videoing it.

After returning to the hotel, we spent a quiet evening getting dinner then walking the one main road in town. We had a lovely unit overlooking some open space and out to the ocean. We heard the surf all evening. The next morning we walked the same main street, got coffee, did a little shopping, and put our feet in the sand & Tasman sea. The water there was unusually mild.

We took off around noon and headed North for Sydney, hoping to see a few more kangaroos 🦘 along the way.🤞