Well things are better in trilogies I suppose, even if they are three weeks late.
So I woke up the second morning of our trip on my own while it was still dark out. I had one of those "where the heck am I" waking up moments, only to have all the memories of the past two days flood back. It was a pretty awesome feeling. Unfortunately, Adam's alarm clock went off not two minutes later from the roof (forgot to mention that the inside of the car is so much more spacious and comfortable to sleep in than the roof) and we decided to get on our way. Driving down the Great Ocean Road with the sun rising was pretty amazing. Incidentally I slept a lot on the ride back, about four hours I was told which deemed me the nickname "sleeping beauty" for the rest of the trip.
Once we reached the end of the Great Ocean Road on our way back towards Melbourne, we stopped at a beach to look for a shower, which we all desperately needed. Luckily almost all the busy beaches I've seen have showers and we found one. Nothing wakes you up like a freezing cold shower. Now that we had gotten off the main road, we decided to use the GPS to get us to and through Melbourne and also the rest of the way home. The only problem being that when we went to turn on the GPS, it showed a computer error. Luckily we had an atlas and two Eagle Scouts (always fun to run into another) in our van so we made it back with only a few wrong turns.
The reason that we ended up going to Melbourne this chosen weekend was because a large group of girls that we knew from Coogee (suburb of Sydney I live in, not sure if I mentioned it) were going to Melbourne this weekend for the free music festival that was taking place downtown. This incidentally lead to a large amount of traffic downtown. After driving around Melbourne for about twenty minutes and realizing that our van was too tall to fit into any parking garage, we drove around looking for a parking spot. The only thing I can compare this to is trying to park in downtown Rochester without a parking garage while Jazz Fest, East End Fest, and Party in the Park are all going on simultaneously. After driving around unsuccessfully for about half an hour more, we were all about at wit's end. Then, almost miraculously, we came to the end of a line of cars and found the most perfect spot I have ever seen. It was only about a half mile away from where the festival was happening, and was right at the end of a row so we didn't have to parallel park that giant purple van.
After walking to the festival, which was pretty cool actually we decided to look for the girls. They were staying in a hostile downtown and had been there for a few days, but were coming to hang out at the festival too. The location couldn't have been cooler. It was right on a river that ran right through the heart of the city and took up a pretty decent amount of space. It ended up being more of a giant carnival with a few music acts every couple hours, lots of rides and food with some professional water-ski jumping on the river (see album). After meeting up with the girls, we decided to walk around the city for a bit and get some dinner. If anyone is ever in Australia, I would absolutely advise going to Melbourne, it's an amazing city. We actually decided to check out the hostile the girls were staying in since they kept relaying horror stories from the past two days they had spent there (i.e. stuck in elevator for half an hour with irish guys) and I won't go into detail but I'm basically scared to stay in any hostile ever now.
After dinner we walked back to our van and decided that we were too tired to actually go out, but wanted to check out the Crown Casino downtown. The best part about walking to the casino was that it was right along the water, and there were tons of street performers and musicians that lined the walk since it was a Sunday night and the festival was going on (Sunday nights are always big party nights in Australia, still not sure why). The casino was cool enough, I lost $20 playing blackjack and that will probably be my casino limit for a while, but the experience was cool. The lobby for the hotel was incredible though, never been in a hotel that nice before. Not to mention the yellow lamborghini or silver miata out front. Around 10:30pm we decided to get back on the road since we needed to find a place to sleep and get a start back to Sydney. It fell on me to do this part of the drive, which didn't bother me, but let's just saying that trying to get out of Melbourne in the dark without a GPS was... stressful. Oh and I was driving on the left side of the road. But we made it out alive, and I drove until about 1:30 in the morning when I found a car park in the middle of the forrest, which creeped everyone else out (seeing as how AJ is still convinced there's dinosaurs in Australia. I am a little too), but I was so tired I hardly cared. Didn't hit any wallabies on the drive either!
Woke up pretty early the next day and got to ride shotgun since I had the role of navigator. Did make a few wrong turns, but Australian roads have about as little signage as possible, which makes navigating slightly more confusing that I would have liked. We stopped about two hours outside of Sydney to eat lunch and toast to our epic road trip, one which I will remember for a long time.
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