After leaving Lerderderg, we headed back to the highway and drove north-ish towards Ballarat. The GPS is awesome and super handy but we managed to veer off onto a slightly wrong path which cut out Ballarat and put us though Ballan and then onto a terrible road down towards Geelong – which was our target destination but we hoped to see Ballarat along the way. The road was one of those “highways” that is so damaged it would be better if they ripped what’s left of the bitumen up and went back to a gravel road. Wagons back in the 1830’s probably had a smoother ride than we did. A Britz motorhome driving out in front of us through a Give Way sign and making us brake heavily with a fully loaded Hilux probably makes the memory of that drive even worse.
Anyway, we went through Geelong and checked out the foreshore areas which are really nice – geez there’s some nice old waterfront homes we checked out. And then the fairly short drive out to Torquay where we stopped to shop in a very overcrowded Sunday town centre. In case there was any Sunday departures from the local caravan parks we checked their websites and the “Torquay Forehores” seemed to have a couple of sites. When we got the office a big sign said “No Vacancies” but we decided to ask anyway and were in luck – at least with a site…not with the peak season price. But the three sites they had basically filled within half an hour of us booking in and the location adjoining a beautiful beach plus a nice strip of restaurants and cafes 50 metres away made it a very attractive spot so we booked in for what we could but three nights was all that was available with the Australia Day long weekend campers coming.
Unable to get family consensus on pizza or thai for dinner we settled on….drum roll…..pizza AND thai…everyone was happy. The pizza got demolished by the three boys while Aim managed to save some of her thai for tomorrow’s lunch. The pizza deal included churros and chocolate dipping sauce which was very very popular. It’s unclear why Aim was entitled to the churros not being part of the pizza eating crew.
JALC-OZ-2018 