Hi everyone,

We woke up early this morning (on purpose) and made our way back to the Twelve Apostles. Oh boy are we glad we did this. We had the viewpoint to ourselves and it was beautiful. Yesterday we had to compete with about 500 people, this morning it was silent, so beautiful.

We then went down the road to do a walk and see a few other landmarks. The first was the blowhole. Not sure why they call it a blow hole since it doesn’t do any blowing. It is nice though. Then we walked another 500m up to see the landmark they call thunder cave. We had all of these to ourselves at this time of the morning which made them all so nice.

Back to our accommodation for a coffee and some breakfast before we went on past Port Campbell to check out some more of the amazing stone formations. First was the London Bridge which is a free standing arch. It was previously attached but it collapsed in 1990 leaving two tourists stranded on the formation and requiring rescue by helicopter.

The second one was the grotto which was a nice walk through the scrub to a little cave that has some still water and a lovely view through to the ocean after you climb down some stairs.

Where we are staying and the small towns around here really are quite rural. The tourism board here came up with the twelve apostles gourmet food artisans trail which is a collection of locally produced gourmet foods and drinks that is curated and mapped. We decided that minus the alcohol stops that we were going to give most of the food trail a go. We had five stops to make along the way.

The first stop on the food artisans trail is a place called Berry World. It is a strawberry farm and also a Thai restaurant. You can do Strawberry picking here in season which it unfortunately is not yet, but we got a steaming hot beef plate and an egg fried rice with some strawberry mocktails.

The second stop was a place called Schulz Organic Dairy. It was a very cute little cafe located on a dairy farm where you eat on picnic tables within a garden. They sell a range of dairy products directly from the farm to the table. We got a scone with rhubarb jam and fresh cream, two glasses of fresh (not raw) milk which was very creamy and delicious and a tasting platter of 6 different dairy products to have with bread. There was salted butter, three different cheeses, a yogurt and a sour cream. It was all really delicious.

The next stop was Gorge Chocolates which was a little chocolate shop on an alpaca farm. It’s kind of random but they also have a playground in the backyard that Julian loved. We grabbed some truffles and ate them, they were definitely better than the ones we had the other day.

The next place was called dairylicious farm fudge. It’s another farm and they specialise in fudge. We ordered the tasting plate which was like $6 and you can try 8 different fudges. They were all pretty great with our favourites being the coconut as well as the salted caramel.

The last stop of the food trail was to the little town of Timboon that has a lovely ice cream shop called the Timboon Fine Ice cream and it is exactly what they claim to be. We kind of cheated on this one as we had it yesterday, but it was so good that we had to have it again today. Yesterday we got lime & coconut, and maple & cinnamon which were both fantastic. Then today we got Lemon swirl and passion fruit meringue. All of the ice cream from here was exceptional.

Each of these places felt local and rustic as well as having really beautiful places to sit and eat. It made for a great half day.

We got back to the Airbnb and relaxed for a while before heading out and grabbing another delicious pizza: this time a bbq meat lovers. There really isn’t much else open in town other than the pub which we didn’t want to go to as the menu looked pretty similar to the brewery we went to yesterday. Luckily the pizza is great.

This marks the end of our time on the great ocean road. We still have two nights to go though and plenty of adventures but they’re technically on the way back, we still look forward to them nonetheless.

Much love,

Ronnie, Aimee and Julian.