Road trip: Day 3 - Robe to Meningie

We had no place to be at any particular time on the third day of our road tripping adventure, so we look things at a more leisurely pace. We started the day with a visit to Long Beach where we saw this sign in the car park:

When we realised we were allowed to drive on the beach we considered it briefly before commonsense prevailed  -  we couldn't risk getting bogged. Ten seconds seconds later we looked at each other and agreed to thumb our noses at commonsense. Pfffft! YOLO!!! (No, we didn't really say that.) Off we went in our Nissan Micra.

 Car-cam

We didn't care that the half-dozen or so other cars on the beach were four-wheel-drives and their owners were looking at us quizzically/scornfully. We didn't know tham. They didn't know us. Whatever! Oh, how we laughed. 

Luke, the Intrepid Explorer 

Although I'd been told Robe was lovely, I didn't have high expectations...maybe because the name makes me think of a tatty dressing gown? But it really is lovely. The beach is long and wide and the foreshore is lined with pine trees. Like Port Fairy, it has some well preserved/restored old buildings, although they are mainly concentrated in one street. 

 Customs House (It's hard to tell but this is a very small building)

Robe also has an obelisk. Contain your excitement! It was built in 1855 to act as a sort of lightless lighthouse for the many ships that sailed by in the treacherous waters of Guichen Bay. There were 30 shipwrecks off the coast there in 1853 alone. I can't...er...shed any light on why they didn't just build a proper lighthouse.  

It looks tiny, but it's actually 12 metres tall 

We left Robe before lunch and stopped off in the tiny township of Cape Jaffa, pretty much only because I like Jaffas.  There wasn't much to see there - just a handful of workshops facing a long, thin jetty and an empty beach stretching for miles in either direction. 

Luke spotted this piece of gloomy, pot-bellied equipment sheltering under the veranda of one of the workshops. It made us giggle. The guys in the workshops must have thought we were strange taking photos of it. 

We stopped for lunch in Kingston SE. The SE stands for 'south east', which, I deduced from scouring the map, is tacked onto the town's name to distinguish it from Kingston OM, or Kingston-on-the-Murray (River), a town further north. (Tangentially, there's a town near Kingston OM called Winkie. Looking at maps is fun.)  The sign on the outskirts of town just says 'Kingston' though. 

We had lunch at the pub (the gluten-free options included included "rice noddles") before visiting the town's main attraction, the Big Lobster, for a quick photo.  

Next on our itinerary was The Coorong, a vast stretch of wetlands that runs parallel to the roaring ocean. We stopped on a track to Chinaman Wells to take photos of a salt pan and purple scrub, and got a surprise when startled a kangaroo and her joey hopped out of nearby bushes. They hopped a safe distance away then stopped to watch us. That was our second encounter with wildlife (not counting the dead snake on the road just out of Robe). 

We saw a lot of salt pans - dried up salt lakes  - and we also saw a salt lake that still had water in it tinged with pink. 

The white fringe on the beach is a thick layer of salt. It was crunchy underfoot and sparkled in the sun. 

Salt encrusted rock

We stopped in Salt Creek (to continue the theme....) and went for stroll in the bush...

The Coorong isn't exactly the place for breathtaking scenery. 

It has a more rugged beauty

...before heading on to the small town of Meningie where we booked into a motel across the road from Lake Albert for a two-night stay. 

Evening grooming hour in the Lake Albert shallows

We had schnitzels for dinner at the pub because we had no other option - there was nowhere else to eat by this time and on schnitzel night thing on offer is schnitzel. (No, there were no gluten-free schnitzels.) There was also no lime in my first gin and tonic so I decided to ask for lime or lemon with the next one because it just isn't the same without that citrusy twist.  "We're from the city," Luke explained when my request was met with slight befuddlement. She gave me a large wedge of lemon in a little dish to go with my drink. 

And then it was back to our motel for bed.  My run of good sleeps continued. Holidaying agrees with me.

Road trip: Day 2 - Warrnambool to Robe

We spent the morning of our second day in Warrnambool, a place that I know quite well as I grew up about 70kms away and my grandmother lived there after she retired.  I've never really visited in tourist-mode though.

After a delicious breakfast at a cafe (more gluten-free fare!), we drove down to the breakwater and Stingray Bay. I didn't appreciate before that Warrnambool has such cool place names (it also has a Lava Street). In the picture below the headland in the distance is Thunder Point.

It was low tide so we poked about in the rock pools and spotted a few small fish in the channel in the picture above. I'm living in hope of finding a baby octopus.  

Before leaving we visiting the Botanic Gardens, which were designed by William Guilfoyle just after he finished work on the Royal Botanic Gardens in Melbourne. It's a much smaller, more minimalist garden - perhaps more a park than a garden - but it's pretty. It has some fantastic fig trees - check out the roots on this beauty!

Band rotunda

Willows and waterlilies

Then we hit the road for Port Fairy. Eagle-eyed Luke spotted this ace old Ampol sign on a derelict garage along the way.

I had high hopes for seeing plenty of ghost signs in country towns, but I was disappointed. Oh well. There were plenty of other things I could point my camera at.

Port Fairy is a charming little fishing town rich with history. It was settled in about 1839, although whalers and seal hunters visited the area from the early 1800s and a whaling station was established in 1835, the same year Melbourne was founded. 

The town has more than 50 buildings classified by the National Trust as well of loads of other cute little cottages and beautiful old buildings.

We strolled along the Moyne River towards the beachfront where we saw what must surely be among the prettiest riverfront properties in Australia. Look at them! No doubt property owners are forbidden from erecting ugly modern glass monstrosities. Good!

There was a lone pelican on the river fishing. I tried to get a picture of it scooping a fish into its bill, but this was as close as I got. Haha. 

We had lunch at a combined art gallery/cafe where Luke ate two of the fattest sausages ever made, and then we were off again. We had accommodation booked in Robe, so we had to keep moving.  We stopped briefly in Portland (the oldest European settlement in the state of Victoria) and then again to take photos of the windfarm at Codrington. 

Those turbines are massive and although many say they are a blight on the landscape, they really are an arresting sight on the horizon. The sign on the gate said 'No public access' but the gate was open so...in we went. 

 Turbines and bovines

Next stop: Cape Bridgewater. It has a beautiful sweep of pristine beach and some of the tallest coastal cliffs in Victoria (which I don't seem to have taken photos of. Here's one. I've walked to the top of it before - it's higher than it looks). 

We did part of the walk to the clifftop, but it was well into the afternoon by now so we didn't have time to go the whole way up and back, much to my disappointment. (Note to self: on our next road trip, less driving each day = more time to explore.)

A shack at the foot of the cliffs

Back on the road, we passed over the border into South Australia. 

We stopped in Mount Gambier to look at the Blue Lake...

...and then kept going until we got to the little fishing town of Robe. We had pizza for dinner at a local restaurant - I had a gluten-free one! -  and collapsed into bed. I'd been having trouble getting to sleep for the couple of weeks before we went away, but I nodded off in no time for the second night in a row. Zzzzzz.