Great Ocean Road Round 2 Day 1

Happy Easter! 🐣🐰

We got up early, had some breakfast, and then finished some last minute packing before heading out to church. We went to Easter Mass at St John the Baptist in Plympton before starting our road trip back to Melbourne. Just as we were about to get on the highway, Allan remembered we wanted to go to Penfolds, a winery a short drive from Ian's house. We diverted through Adelaide Hills back to Penfolds.

After about ten minutes, we arrived at the winery. The skies were gray, and it was a bit drizzly, so we took a couple pictures outside before making our way in. The tasting room was a rectangle with a bar in the middle, smaller tasting rooms along a long wall, and then a myriad of different sized circle and square tables for walk in tasting. There was also a long bar area behind the serving bar for guided tastings after tours. There were glass cases with expensive collector's bottles including a long case of 'The Grange,' a bottle for each year since they'd been making the wine range. The most recent bottle sold for more than $160,000 (Aussie dollars, but still pretty crazy).

A lovely man served us our first wines, two whites. He was really knowledgeable about the wines and the winery, and just had good chat. Many wineries served us Riesling from vines in the Clare Valley north of Barossa and Penfolds was no exception. We also had a Chardonnay, which Allan enjoyed. Then we got to the red wines, and we had a special tasting menu because it was Easter! Out of the wines we tasted, the St Henri Shiraz took the day for me. It was oaky but smooth and fruity. The last wine, a Shiraz, sells for $200 a bottle, so to have a taste felt pretty special. And it was a lovely wine, but not for that price 😞.

We left Penfolds behind retracing our steps a bit back onto the highway on our way south. Our plan was to get onto the Great Ocean Road today passing through Mount Gambier again to maybe see a sinkhole we missed our first time through. This plan didn't happen.

Driving along the road the 4 and a bit hours to Mount Gambier, Allan saw a sign for a World Heritage site, and it was caves. He quickly tried to Google about it, and we pulled off to investigate further. In the end, we booked an hour long fossil cave tour at Naracoorte Caves in the Victoria Fossil Cave.

The tour didn't start for another 20 minutes or so, so we walked around the visitor's center and then grabbed a quick cup of coffee before heading down to the cave entrance down the road (the weather was pretty chilly and the drizzle and damp made it feel cooler. Our tour was the last one of the day at 4pm, and it lasted an hour, so we definitely weren't making it as far as Apollo Bay like we planned tonight. We had a full tour group for the cave (plus a couple people extra who fibbed about their ticket time).

We walked down into the cave and didn't have to go very far before there were stalagmites and fatalities and crystals everywhere. Apparently part of the rock/crystal in the cave looks a bit like Queen Victoria, hence the name. I could see it, Allan couldn't. We walked through the cave marveling at all the different rock and crystal formations, some that had lighter and darker waves like bacon, and plenty of limestone.

Our guide, a paleontology student at the local university, talked us through the history of the cave's discovery. A guy came down looking bat guano (to make dynamite and gunpowder) and instead found the cave! Future cave explorers and paleontology students a decade or so later further explored the cave and stumbled upon all of the bones and fossils. Apparently the area is known for holes that open up in the ground and animals, megafauna, fell down into the caves and over time the bodies became fossilized. It was all pretty interesting, and my description isn't near adequate enough, but it's worth a Google!

The final area in the cave was the area with all the fossils. There were some skeletons out together with bones from the cave, and one recreated skeleton of an animal who's bones they did find. It was pretty wild to see all the bones on the floor of the cave that they've partially excavated. They've dug as far back as an Olympic swimming pool and as deep as 7 meters and barely scratched the surface. It is sad that so many animals fell and got trapped in the cave, but wow, I've never seen so many prehistoric bones in one place naturally.

After we came out of the cave, we got back on the road and finished the hour and a half back to Mount Gambier. We stopped off for Easter dinner at an Asian fusion place and had some duck and pork with rice. It was tasty, and better than ramen noodles or McDonald's for Easter. Once we finished dinner, we went a further 2 hours to the Twelve Apostles because we knew you could sleep there. We got there pretty late, and it was past midnight when we managed to get ready for bed (bed being relative...I slept along the back seats and Allan slept in the trunk). A long day, but we got on the Great Ocean Road, even if not as far as planned, and had some nice stops along the way.Read more