Mission Accomplished

Deb and I took off for a few days and headed to one of our favourite places in the world, the west coast of Victoria. Admittedly I haven’t seen the whole world (or anything like a sizable chunk) but I have seen some great places. And these few hundred kilometres of coastline pack in an awful lot of spectacular scenery.

I have a slight problem. I have come back with over 700 photos.

Even given the fact that I tend to take a fair number of piccies of the same subject (wouldn’t it look better from this angle?), I still have a couple of hundred photos from just a few days that I would consider worth sharing on this blog.

My imaginary Uncle Harry would be proud.

Now I am not going to swamp you with all of them tonight. However, I did talk last time about going hunting.

Among other things I like photographing the sky. In particular I have recently conceived of a desire to photograph my first ever dawn.
I see plenty of dawns but for one reason or another I had never properly photographed a dawn. I posted about a disappointment recently.

Well on the second morning I of our holiday I was up early.
No use, complete cloud cover.
Disappointed again, I went back to bed.

Now defying the conventions of uncle Harry’s slide nights, I am going to jump forward a whole 24 hours.

The next morning I was up again before first light.

Fog.

But out to the east a hint of clear sky. I decided I would go hunting piccies of dawn.

I leapt into the car and headed east out along The Great Ocean Road.

As I drove East I slipped out from under the low bank of cloud.

And this is what I saw.


Now, next time I go on Holiday I can sleep in!

Warnambool (or Uncle Harry's slide night.)

Well I haven’t posted for a few days. My excuse is that I have been off gallivanting. Deb and I enjoyed our run down to the Great Ocean Road the weekend before last, so much that we decided to have a look at the section we didn’t see.

Being almost entirely selfish we left the sprogs at home to fend for themselves and took off mid morning on Saturday.

I have to admit I went totally nuts with the camera and have come back with around 500 photos from about a day and a half. This kind of leaves me with a dilemma of how to share the experience. I suspect it is a little (or a lot) hard to even give a hint of the spectacular coastal scenery without taking a number of posts. The problem is I don’t want to end up with a blog that seems like Uncle Harry’s slide night.

To all those Uncle Harrys out there, no offence is intended and I am sure your slide nights are both educational and entertaining.

We cut across inland to just past the far end of the Great Ocean Road, to Warnambool about 290 km (180 miles) from home.
We took our time stopping along the way for lunch at Inverleigh. I photographed this pub there, Aussie bush pubs do not normally look like this. Built out of Victorian Bluestone and with a Welsh slate roof this is a type of building that was put up mainly from the 1850’s to 1890’s apart from the local stone I suspect it would look just as happy in a village somewhere in the UK.

As we pulled in to the outskirts of Warnambool I spied a flock of cockatoos on a patch of grass by the side of the road. Thinking they were Sulphur-crested Cockatoos I pulled over to get a photo. They were in fact Long-billed Corellas .


The ground was soft from rain the night before and they were digging clover and grass roots for food.

After checking into our accommodation and having a cuppa we went out to Logan’s Beach which is famed for whale watching. From a lookout up in the sand dunes we quickly spotted whales just off shore. In fact a mother and calf were just beyond the surf maybe 15 to 20 metres from the beach.I think from the tip of a nose they were Southern Right Whales.
They just mucked around just beyond the breakers for more than half an hour.
Eventually a very cold wind drove us away from the shore.

Well Uncle Harry has had a long day, so that is all for now.
I’ll just leave you with a hint of what I might talk about next time.