The start of a 3 day journey to Melbourne via the Great Ocean Road. We started late but with a full cooked breakfast (cooked by Nicola). In Oz there seems to be two styles of B+B, the normal one where the guest sleeps and eats and the DIY B+B where everything is provided and you do the cooking. This is much more common and in this case tasted great! The accommodation in McClaren Vale was a very pleasant two room garden flat with all mod cons which made it harder...

Our final morning in Adelaide saw us pack our bags and head for the South Australian Museum for the morning. Very easy to find on North Terrace (the older part of the city has a strict grid system bounded by Terraces on each side inside the ring of parks. We decided that the best use of our time was on the guided 3/4 hour tour so we could get an overview. Nicola particularly wanted to see the Aboriginal Art section. Our guide was a good humoured, middle-aged wom...

The exertions of the previous day had taken their toll so we left the hotel late. The walk to McDonalds (to use the WiFi and forcing us to eat chips) took us past the Cross Country course that is being created in Victoria Park near the hotel. The Australian Horse Trails are the only Olympic standard event in the Southern Hemisphere all year and is comparable to the Burley Horse Trials. The venue is right next to the city centre and the jumps are HUGE. The staff w...

We can now reveal all as to why we timed the visit to Australia when we did. We have SEEN Father Christmas 6 weeks early in the Grand Christmas Pageant in Adelaide. We were lucky enough to see him along with 335,000 other South Australians in 30 degree heat at the end of a parade lasting over an hour and a half (This might explain the difficulty in booking a hotel room in Adelaide). The annual event seems to be something of a hidden treasure even though this wa...

Our plan to see the sunrise again at the lighthouse failed, Nicola said it was too cloudy, I think that was an excuse to stay in bed a bit longer. We heard our final dawn chorus before leaving the house asleep in Byron Bay for the 2 hr drive to Brisbane Airport. The original plan had been to have 3 nights in Byron and 1 night near the airport but this would have cut out most of the day by the beach and we were not sure of the quality of hotel we would find in Bri...