Howdy People,

After Kate's blog hogging I thought it was about time that I wrote something! As Kate said in the last post we hired a car and drove from Adelaide to Melbourne. While it was an enjoyable trip, I wouldn't say that we were that enthusiastic about it all. Mainly due to the fact that we were leaving Australia not long after. More on that later....

There were some great places on our road trip though, we started with the Adelaide hills and as Kate was feeling a little homesick we decided to head to Macclesfield. The Fleurieu peninsular was beautiful (and suprisingly green) with barely a backpacker in sight. Robe was another quaint little town and had one of the top two hostels that we've stayed in all year! Bonus! Blue Lake in Mt Gambier was impressive too, though the town itself was pretty horrible. We stayed in an old jail converted into a hostel, complete with big slamming metal doors. I'm not too sure that Kate liked it that much (well nor did I for that matter - it was a bit grotty) but she was even more shocked to open the cell door in the morning and find herself face to face with a Llama! I kid you not. That surely goes down as one of the more surreal moments of this trip!

We then headed back into Victoria and along the Great Ocean Road, it is a stunning drive with fantastic scenery and coastline, from the Bay of Islands, the Arch, Loch Ard Gorge, London Bridge and finally the 12 Apostles there is a lot to see that is all great. In Apollo Bay after seeing all that we started to flick through the photo's on the camera, it was all good until it wouldn't switch back to capture mode! So the camera was broken we could look at pictures but not take any! It was probably through overuse, we reckon we're on about 8000 pictures so far. However after much rushing round in Melbourne and then Sydney it has been fixed, so you can all breath a sigh of relief that there will be yet more pictures for you to look at!

From Apollo Bay we had a nice day on the beach, it was good to relax a bit after shuffling from town to town and then a day in the shops, stocking up on board shorts from the factory outlets! Armed with a rubbish disposeable camera (that we managed to get 8 pictures from out of the normal 27) we headed up to Ballarat and Sovereign Hill a living museum set back in the gold rush days of the mid 1800's, it was ok but not great. Then it was back to Melbourne and back to where it all began, just under a year ago, the loop was complete and we were back into familiar territory. Not for long though because we got the bus up to Sydney the next day and spent a few days catching up with people, closing bank accounts, doing tax returns, etc. With that all done, it was time to say goodbye to the big old land of Oz, 'Exit' stamps were added to the passports the day before we would have been kicked out! So a year in Oz and there have been many more ups than downs and definately an experience that we'll never forget.

As for 'They think it's all over .....', you may think hurrah we don't have to listen to Rich and Kate ramble on about their adventures now, but unfortunately you don't get away quite so easily (remember, we know where you live!) as we're now in Christchurch, New Zealand preparing to travel around Australia's next door neighbour! We're meeting up with friends next week and travelling with them for a while before (hopefully) going it alone again and getting a campervan to travel around.

Until the next adventure ............

Take care

Rich and Kate