Well we jumped in head first and went on a camping/driving tour of the Great Ocean Road along the southern coast of Victoria Australia. I suppose it is one of the most famous roads in the world, or at least that's what the tourist literature says about it. The number of tour buses with tourist from many different countries verifies that statements as well.
We got a chance to go down for a long weekend and decided to camp for the experience. We stayed about 90 km west of Melbourne that translated into a 2+ hour drive through the curves at a place called Kennett River. As we were checking in the lady at the desk gave us a bag of bird seed for the parrots and told us to look up in the Eucalyptus trees to see what we could see. Imagine our surprise when we walked out the door and looked up to see a couple of koalas right there. Then the parrots came down looking for food. All this and we weren't even in the campsite officially.
We pulled around to our site. There were probably well over one hundred little spots marked off. They were kind enough to put us right next to a playground and right behind the bath house/tiolets. We had tent for the girls and something called a camper trailer we had rented from the outdoor recreation office on the military base. The camper trailer was really a glorified tent that had a mattress inside. When you took the cover off there was a frame and it unfolded into a large tent with a queen size bed on the top of the trailer with a large enclosed room on the side. Pretty comfortable. It also had a two burner gas stove that pulled out from underneath.
From there we were able to trek out on day trips to the surrounds. The first visit was to a place called Mait's Rest which was a 30 minute walk through a temperate rain forest. Pretty cool, never been in a rain forest before. You knew you were somewhere different as soon as you walked in with the ferns and moss and huge old trees.
From there we went to Cape Otway and saw the oldest standing lighthouse in Australia. The interesting thing about this structure was that there was no mortar used in between the blocks. Somehow the stone masons cut the block so that they were all interlocked.
The second day we took the long drive ( about 2 1/2 hours) to see the rock formations along the coast called the 12 Apostles. There's actually only about eight now, because erosion has caused several to fall in, but they were still striking. We also saw one called the Arch, can you guess why it's called that?
An ended up with one called London Bridge that used to have a bridge that ran from land out to a rock pilon. About 17 years ago the bridge collasped. Would you believe that a couple that were camping behind us had been there the day it collapsed? Pretty amazing. Fortunately, no one was hurt that day. Several people were stranded out on the outer rock an it took a couple of hours to get a helicopter in to lift them out. Today there are helicopters flying over every few minutes. It's a busy place. We ended the day with a cup of coffee for the adults and hot chocolate for the girls. It was special hot chocolate though. The milk was heated as if it were going in cappuchino and delivered to the table with a dish of chocolate pieces to melt in the hot milk. I think the word applied was "yummo".
Our third day we slept in a bit and got out about lunchtime. We visited a place called the Otway Fly Tree walk. On a previous day we had walked through the rain forest. This gave us the opportunity to walk above the rain forest on specially made steel walkways. It went from ground level to over 60 meters high in the highest tower. We all made it. Even Rebecca who is scared of heights made the climb. She was keen to get down after she accomplished what she set out to do.
Over all we had a great time and saw more koalas in the wild that we thought possible. There were parrots to great us each morning and they would land on your arm to be fed. We even visited a trail at night that had something called glow worms. These are the pupae of some sort of gnat that live in the banks of rain forests and as the name suggests glow at night. We were skeptical at first, but when it got dark enough we sure enough saw them. It's been very dry and we were told that they do much better in the wet, but it was still impressive none the less. It was a little freaky being in not just the woods but a rain forest at night with no one else around. We were all ready to get back in the car and get to the campsite!
All in all it was a great experience and we plan to do it again.
Rebecca's comments from the trip: My favorite was Apollo Bay where we had the special hot chocolate. I also liked the parrots that landed on my arm to eat seeds.
The girls got a chance to go to a friends farm and watch a flock of sheep get shorn. When they got there it turned out that there was more work than watching. 
Well we jumped in head first and went on a camping/driving tour of the Great Ocean Road along the southern coast of Victoria Australia. I suppose it is one of the most famous roads in the world, or at least that's what the tourist literature says about it. The number of tour buses with tourist from many different countries verifies that statements as well.
