Melbourne - Portland

For the next 5 days we are making our way down the Great Ocean Road, so we woke up early and headed out to collect our cheap and cheerful camper, suitably named 'El Cheapo', from Jucy rentals. Our host kindly said we could leave our bags whilst we collect it so that's exactly what we did. Our expectations were not high but after the all singing, all dancing van we had in New Zealand, it was a tad underwhelming. It's a Toyota Previa people carrier (which Dad used to ferry me and friends around Bristol in back in the day) minus all of the back seats. It comes with a pump action sink, complete with part of a chain where a plug used to be, one camping stove on a pull out drawer which can be used whilst sheltering under the open boot, a mix mash of cooking utensils and some nice bright green and purple bedding. What more could we need for our Great Ocean Road road trip? Once we had our bags we then did a food shop for the week in Aldi and Woolies.

We decided to do the Great Ocean Road backwards as suggested by a blog Blake read. This meant that we had a 4+ hour drive inland to start, so we got on our way. A couple of hours into the drive we stopped at Lake Colac for a spot of lunch. A perfect view whilst we tucked into a sausage sandwich and a cuppa.

We had thought about visiting Cape Bridgwater today however the journey took us a bit longer than we expected so we headed straight to the campsite. Our home for the night is the Sawpit Picnic Area in Mt Clay State Forest, which is just outside of Portland. We definitely had the saddest looking van there and managed to park up near a crazy singing man doing rock covers! There are also a few cute friendly wallabies. After a cup of tea and a game of Phase 10, we got out the cooking bits and made a delicious sausage casserole. After we washed up there was only one thing left to do and that was make the bed. A simple reconfigure of the bench seats and some sheets and we were in night mode. Our camper doesn't have a battery or anything so we are completely off grid, so once it got dark we tucked ourselves into bed and got an early night.Read more