Month: March 2017

Barwon Heads: More Beach Life

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While we were in Barwon Heads, we officially passed the 6-month mark of our adventure (March 5)! When we look back on all we’ve done and seen and learned and experienced, though, it’s amazing!

Here are G and L ready to walk Sunday services at this sweet, little Anglican Church. Other than a young priest and his family, we were the 4 youngest people there by several years (out of the 10 other people there), but it was a nice service with beautiful music!  

Heading back to our cottage, we spotted this cute little camper cafe!  How fun would that be?

So how’s this for a coincidence — my dad sent me the picture below on the same day that we saw the coffee camper van, as an option for our travels !! 🙂  Perhaps it’s a sign…better start researching camper vans and pink paint! 🙂

Just down the street was this quaint little pop-up garden market.  Unfortunately, we weren’t there on the open days, but it looked like lots of fun!

We had to stop in a shop called Kiitos because it was a word we used a lot while in Finland, which means “thank you.”  The owner is actually from Greece but has spent a lot of time in Finland.  She was fun to chat with and had a great selection of Marimekko products, including this cute little coin purse.

 

The remaining time in Barwon Heads was spent in the yard and garden, on the beach, and at the playground.  

Here’s G working on her handstand and back walkover!  

A few of the beautiful garden flowers!

Another day, we walked down to the post office to send a few postcards and had a fun chat with the couple running the post office, who knew where Minnesota is (which not surprisingly is rare 🙂  )!  The postman’s brother’s wife’s sister’s son got drafted by the Twins — Lewis Thorpe! Small world! 🙂  

While wandering around on the beach at low tide one day, we found the pools and puddles that Delia mentioned to us!  They were great fun!  We could walk wayyyy out into the water on sand bars that during high tide are completely submerged.  Often the little puddles can contain various small sea creatures, and they are super squishy — like quick sand!

 

L was hoping his “hello” sign in the sand would be readable to planes flying over! 🙂

We shared a couple of muffins at a little cafe, which turned into feeding crumbs to the “birds!” 🙂  Then it was playground time for the kids while Mike grabbed some cider from the drive-up liquor store (!) and sausages from the local butcher shop and grilled them for lunch. Yum!

  

Later on, the kids and I walked to the store to get pancake mix for dinner!  Shake it and bake (er…grill) it! 🙂

On our last night, we took a walk down by the Barwon Head Golf Club and then onto the 13th Beach to check out the waves!  They were huge!  We walked down one set of stairs and then along the beach to another set of stairs just as the tide was reaching up to the steps!!  Glad we had the alternate set of steps to use, or we would have been scaling sand dunes!  

On our way back, we stopped and took pictures of the difference between the low tide that we’d played on earlier in the day and high tide, which had completely covered all those areas!

We ended the night (and our beach stay) with hot chocolate and a game of Crazy Eights.

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!  

Afterward, we walked down to the beach, made it past a land shark! 🙂 and found a great playground!

We were close to everything!  There was a grocery store really close as well as a quaint downtown area full of fun restaurants and shops.

We were definitely getting used to this “beachy” way of life as we settled in for the night with our books and the smell of the sea in the air! 

 

Apollo Bay: Boogie Boarding!

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After telling Andy (the Airbnb host) about the body surfing adventures, he offered to loan us some boogie boards.  The kids were super excited, so we headed to the beach, in the same spot the next day.  It was awesome!!!  The kids and I all successfully rode the waves!  

L and G contemplate their moves…

And then head out to give it a try!

 

I couldn’t resist trying, so here G and I are waiting for the right wave…

And here it is!

How’s that for synchronized boogie boarding!! 🙂

What do you do when your mom’s using your boogie board?  Dig a hole, of course!

Our last day at Apollo Bay Beach couldn’t have been better.  And what a better way to end the day than with more (yes more!) ice cream!!  Mike went with chocolate, G had the orange/chocolate, L had pancake again, and I had butterscotch.

What a great 5-day stay at Apollo Bay!!

Apollo Bay: Body Surfing

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We decided to walk to the playground one morning as it was a bit overcast, but while we were there, the sun broke through, and it turned into a beautiful, blue sky afternoon!

The kids started to play with some other kids, while Mike and I started chatting with their parents.  They were spending the weekend in Apollo Bay but live in Melbourne. The kids were having a great time playing together, but it was getting to be lunch time, so we ended up getting take away fish and chips and having a picnic together near the playground.

After lunch, the kids played on the playground a bit more and then we decided to have a look at the beach just on the other side of the hill.  As we got to the top of a sandy hill, the view was AMAZING!  It was the actual Apollo Bay part of the beach!  It’s a little sheltered and had gently rolling waves coming in, so the kids had a blast swimming!

Because of the rolling waves, they decided to try body surfing and were semi successful except for getting sand everywhere — linings of suits and generally in places you don’t want sand.

In random news, Mike spotted the Mystery Machine parked along the street near the playground.

After all that work swimming and for a burst of energy to walk back to our house, we stopped for ice cream at Dooley’s. (Pancake for L, blueberry for G, honey malt for Mike, and cookies and cream for me).  They were all exceptionally good yet again — even the pancake was really good!  We survived the much slower walk home…it’s hard to walk fast when you’ve got sand in your pants…and enjoyed some beautiful views!

We ended the day with “Pirates of the Caribbean” (which the kids hadn’t seen yet) and popcorn. 🙂