Melbourne: Day 3

Read about the beginning of my trip first!
 Melbourne Day 1 post!
Melbourne Day 2 post!


Yet again, on Saturday we woke up before the sun at 6:30. Noticing a theme of not much sleep here? So were we. That day's tour was the Great Ocean Road tour, which is basically just a long, famous road along the coast west of Melbourne. It had gorgeous views the whole way! On the tour the day before, we asked what the best side of the car to sit on was so we all sat in the single seats on the left side of the van and could see everything perfectly!

After an hour drive - with us sleeping the whole way - we finally got to the start of the road and took pictures with the official sign! Then we started driving and the views were absolutely incredible. I've seen a lot of beautiful places since being here and this might just top the list. We stopped at a few different little pull-over places to take some pictures of the beaches and cliffs. It was honestly breath taking. After driving for a while and taking it in, we stopped at a camp ground that had a bunch of wild koalas just hanging out in the trees, sleeping as usual. There were also a ton of gorgeous birds in around that would come eat bird food out of your hands, which was so cool! Alex is terrified of birds and she did it too! To reward ourselves, we got a little pre-lunch ice cream from a convenience store. Then we loaded back into the van and drove to the town where we had our lunch stop. We had a little time there so we wandered around and took some more pictures!

Our next stop was the rainforest! We got to go on like a half hour hike through the rainforest and see all sorts of cool trees and plants. It's crazy how many different kinds of environments there are in such close proximity to each other here. Beach, rainforest, super dry forests, deserts, they have it all within an hour of each other! Then we were off to the 12 Apostles! 

They're basically a bunch of huge, tall rocks off the shore and it's beautiful! Although there used to be twelve of them, there were only like 8 of them left standing. This was by far the most tourist-y place we went all day. There were TONS of people everywhere. It was absolutely insane. That definitely took away from the beauty a little bit, because people can be so rude.

The final two stops were Loch Ard Gorge, which is basically just a giant cliff formation that makes a nice little inlet and London Bridge, which used to be a giant connected rock bridge, but part of it collapsed in the 90s and left 2 people stranded on it for a while! Both of these were also gorgeous! It's seriously unbelievable to me how beautiful the world is and that it isn't all like the boring, flat corn fields I grew up surrounded by.

Then we started on our long, three hour drive home! This time, we made it back to the hostel before any of our roommates so we were able to pack up and get ready in peace before waking up at 4:30 the next morning to catch our flight back to Brisbane. By the time we got back to campus, we were tired, cranky, smelly and ready to sleep forever. Except we had to do homework, so that was a downer to an otherwise AMAZING weekend with the best friends a girl could ask for! I cannot even begin to explain how blessed I feel right now to be able to see the world and enjoy so many things that most people never get to experience in their lives, and do be able to do it with some of my best friends makes it that much better. As usual, check out my facebook to see all my pictures!! Have a great week everyone!