Barwon Heads: Adventures along the way

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Barwon Heads: Saturday, March 4 to Tuesday, March 7

We packed, cleaned, and left Apollo Bay driving along the beautiful Great Ocean Road toward Barwon Heads. There are amazing views of the ocean and coastline among the twists and turns, so I tried to enjoy it as well as point out speed limits, tight turns, and buses coming toward us. 🙂

Thanks to some great advice from Delia and Jeff’s friend Leon, we stopped off at Kennett River to see some koalas. It’s a great little area off the Great Ocean Road where you can park, walk a few meters, and see them in their natural habitat, sleeping in and eating the eucalyptus/gum trees. They were a little high up for my camera to get a detailed view, but you can make out this little guy’s shape.

In addition to the koalas, there are quite a few King Parrots that live in the same area, who are happy to eat bird seed right out of your hand!

We were also lucky enough to spot a kookaburra up close!

We made another stop along the way in Lorne, a lovely seaside town. (Mike and I stopped there almost 13 years ago while on our honeymoon! We remember it being a little less busy…probably because tourism and building have continued to grow over the years and also because when we were there, it was May, which is winter here.)

We had a bit of lunch at Kafe Kaos, where G and L ordered falafel wraps! Thanks to Jeff and Delia for the kids’ new found favorite food! It was a basically a ton of veggies and falafel in a wrap with sweet chili sauce!! How healthy! I had some scrumptious fish and chips with a side of a beet/carrot/cucumber salad, and Mike had a spicy chicken sandwich.

After lunch, we walked down by the beach and watched a bunch of surfers and boogie boarders on some really big waves and spotted a cockatoo watching, too!

We made one more stop before getting to Barwon Heads. It was another recommendation by both Jeff and Delia and Leon — the kangaroos at Anglesea Golf Course. We weren’t sure we’d see any as the suggestion was to hang out on the patio around dusk, when they are more active. As we were there around 3pm, we knew timing wasn’t exactly right. What we didn’t know about was that the golf course is now conducting kangaroo tours! There are about 300 kangaroos living on the golf course! Unfortunately, the next tour wasn’t available for another hour.

We headed out to the road, but as we were looking at the golf course, we noticed there was a mob of about 15 kangaroos lying in the shade off to the side of the 12th green! We pulled over and walked over to the fences to take some pictures. Again, my zoom didn’t zoom enough to get super close shots, but it was fun to see nonetheless!

The next stop was our darling seaside destination — Barwon Heads on the Bellarine Peninsula. We got settled into the neat-as-a-pin and sweet-as-could-be cottage with beautiful gardens all around and a picket fence!