Mar 17, 2014

ADELAIDE & THE GREAT OCEAN ROAD

Heeey guys.
As you probably know I have now started my amazing journey with Christina, which is absolutely awesome. She arrived Thursday the 20th, and the days leading up to I was just hanging out with people and enjoying my last time in Adelaide. The Saturday before was my last shift at the Elephant, which was so weird. I didn’t like it.. I still don’t haha. Aaron made me my last knock-off drink which was a small inception-bomb ish thingie (look it up), basically energy drink in a pint glass, two shot glasses balancing each other on the top of the pint glass. This is a very bad explanation, I apologize in advance. One of them had jäger, the other one had a “slippery nipple”, which is ¼ white sambucca and ¾ baileys. What you do is you take the slippery nipple, then the jäger falls into the energy drink and creates a jägerbomb that you then drink. It knocked me out a bit haha. Well afterwards some of us went to Tan’s, woke up Jay and continued drinking until like 10 am. It was a good night. A sad, but good night.
One of the days we went for my last vege burger at the ele as well. So sad. I could really eat one right now… Tuesday night we had the Stella Artois pouring competition at work. So Stella does this every year, a lot of bar people compete to be the best to pour the Stella in the 9-point-pour they want and then in the end represent Australia in different Stella events for a year. So the ones of us that wanted to do it did it, and it was a lot of fun. Obviously I couldn’t really compete, since I’m not even Australian, but it was fun to try. Both Koji and Caroline got picked (yaaay, good job guys), and they’ll be competing against other bar people from Adelaide soon. The finale is in France at Cannes film festival, so I expect one of them to win and then I’ll come watch hehe. After that we had our last staff party before Kristian and I would leave, so we all went to Koji’s and got wasted. Basically. It was a lot of fun. Pictures will follow once I get time to go through them haha.
Then Thursday Christina arrived. I was late to pick her up because apparently you can’t count on buses in Adelaide, you just have to yolo it pretty much. It was so good seeing her again! We went home for a shower and a nap, because Thursdays are PJ’s nights, and we wouldn’t want to miss out on my last one. We met up with Blake at the Ele and then we went to a drive-in theater and watched Wolf Creek 2. Of course we had to watch a horror movie about backpackers in Australia, what else. Blake has put mattresses in the back of his pick-up car thingie, so it was awesome. Afterwards we dropped the car at Tan’s and then went to PJ’s. Many vodkas later we ended at Sugar (as usual), and then Hungry Jacks for night time snacks. That’s basically our going out agenda, so nothing unusual to that hah.
Friday was hungover day. We couldn’t do much at all, just slept and felt sorry for ourselves. We went into town to go to the Garden of Unearthly Delights, which is part of the fringe in Adelaide at the moment, and has a lot of food, rides and shows. Festival atmosphere. Well, it was impossible to get in, so we went and had yiros with Jay and Sean (Tan’s friend). And then we went back home haha. Saturday we went to pick up our rental car from Wicked Campers. It was reallyyyy dodgy looking when we got there, but we got a car and that was all good. It had a tent on the roof though, not really what we ordered, but whatever, it worked out fine. Next step was driving. In the wrong freaking side of the road. I started, it was horrible for about 2 minutes, and then it was actually all good. We went to get food for our trip, took a look at the hills and Mt. Lofty, and then stopped by at Tan’s to drop some stuff. Later that night we went into town and sat at the Ele for some drinks. It was Saturday night. First Saturday night in about 5 months that I wasn’t working. It felt so weird, and I just wanted to go to the other side of the bar and help out haha. Collect the glasses, put the stools back, oh all them habits. I felt sad, it was my last night in Adelaide, my last night at the Elephant and I had to say goodbye to people. It was so horrible. The world would be so much better without goodbyes. Oh and we actually went to the Garden before, so we still got to enjoy that!
Sunday morning we woke up, had a shower and packed the car. I said bye to Tom and then we were off to the hills to see Aldo, Jen and Mia one last time. We had lunch and just talked for some time, and I got to see the house one last time. How I’m gonna miss these guys, my Aussie family. I’m already excited for when I get to see them again, and I can’t even imagine not being able to just go and see them when I want..
Then we went back down to Adelaide to Tan’s so I could say goodbye to Tan, Blake, Jay, Lachy and Kristian. We spend a couple of hours there just chatting, but yeah. We had to leave, and it was so hard. I wanna say I’ve never cried that much before, but that would be a lie, cause we all know I cry a loooot. And this was definitely not an exception haha, I felt so horrible, you have no idea. I miss them so much already, it’s hard leaving best friends behind. I will see them soon again, I know I will.
So that was Adelaide. Another chapter of my life written down, finished. Another chapter that I’ll look back at with the biggest freaking smile on my face (that is when I stop crying because I miss it…). I mean, looking back I had no idea how it was gonna turn out. It became so much better than I could’ve ever thought it would be. It made the thought of going home, start studying and moving into Copenhagen horrible and not appealing at all. That takes a lot. Now it’s one of the best memories I have, and I’m glad I can call it my second home. It was some awesome months, and they will always make me happy thinking back at J
Sooo, that turned into some deep shit, and now this post is taking me so much longer to write… haven’t even gotten to our travelling yet haha, oh god.

Well off we go. We left Adelaide around 2pm, and our first stop on the way to Melbourne was gonna be Robe. A small fishing town a couple of hours down the coast. We found a nice little spot in the middle of nowhere and decided to stay the night. The tent on the roof was really easy, but we still consider ourselves masters of camping because of that one. It was really windy and pretty cold, but we got through the first night, which was goooood. Monday we were off at 10 and our first stop was Mt. Gambier and the Blue lake, which is formed in a volcano crater. It was stunning, and we stopped to have lunch there and chill for a bit. We also bought a cord for the car, so we could blast our awesome music real road trip style, oh yeaaah. There wasn’t a lot to see on this part of the trip, basically just trees, desert looking stuff and the road. We stopped in Warrnambool, found a big playground and stayed there for a bit (swings are the best, just saying), and then we tried to find a place to stay the night. We ended up in Port Cambell on a camping spot, where we met a nice police officer. Well, he came right as we were cooking our food in the womens toilets (it was warmer in there….), and told us that the spot was actually closed and the restrooms were supposed to be locked. We freaked a little, since we had an open fire in the restroom, and Christina decided to hide stuff in one of the showers because I yelled she should get it out of the way. We had an awkward encounter when he found it, but he was a nice guy and let us stay, so it was all good hahaha.
Tuesday we hit the Great Ocean Road for real and it got a bit more exciting. We saw some of the amazing rocks/cliffs in the water off of the coast like thunder cave and the twelve apostles. It was absolutely amazing and completely unreal. So beautiful. We also saw a brown snake, which scared the crap out of me being like “Christina, don’t move!! It’ll kill you!”… but we survived. On our way to Apollo Bay we went through some rainforest and had a walk in there as well, and it was pretty awesome. I like the rainforest, it’s really cool. There were heaps of huge trees, and it was just kind of amazing. We then drove off to Apollo Bay, Lorne and Torquay, small surfer towns that are really nice to just have a walk in and chill for a bit, so we did that. We then continued towards Geelong, a bigger town about 100 km away from Melbourne. This was where we wanted to spend our last night. As we were driving in the middle of the town I looked out my window and saw…. A huge huntsman (spider) sitting on the window. Or it was its freaking hairy legs just sitting there on the window and then it crawled away. Needless to say neither of us dared to leave the car, and when we finally got out to take a look at it, it was gone. Gone. Aka inside our lovely tent on top of our roof. We freaked for a bit, and then continued.
As we had found free camping spots the first two nights and therefore hadn’t had a shower or anything, we decided to stay at a caravan park for the night. We got all set, made our dinner (pasta and ketchup, because we’re that awesome… basically that was all we got, and it worked out fine). We had a good sleep, and actually stayed in the tent, convinced that if I woke in the middle of the night with a giant spider crawling in my sleeping bag I would have a heart attack. Luckily that didn’t happen. Or I didn’t wake up at least, haha. The next morning we were off pretty early. We had two older women as neighbors. They looked pretty strange and we think they actually lived in their tents. As we are packing up one of them comes up to me and says “that’s a pretty cool tent” (you couldn’t understand her very well, but I managed). I just replied very quickly as it was awkward. She then goes “uhm… do you girls do heroin?”….. uhm what?! Hahaha. “No, we don’t do heroin”. “Not just a little bit?”. “No, absolutely not”. “Alright… well it is very bad for you too…. I was just wondering if you girls wanted some drugs”. No thanks, I think we’re good. At that stage we concluded that ending our camping adventure that day was a really good idea, since we apparently looked like we did heroin hahaha. Just as a side note, the old lady then got into their car and reversed straight into a really nice car on the other side of the path leaving a huge dent, and then she ran down a tree pole…. So we left.
We then drove towards Melbourne and found a place to clean the car. We cleaned it as well as we could, but it was kind of hard and must have looked really funny. Driving into Melbourne was actually alright, and we were surprised that we actually handled all that “driving-in-the-wrong-side”-stuff so well. We handed the car in at about 1 pm, and the guy didn’t even check it… So much for that cleaning!
Alright, that was the great ocean road. Melbourne will be up as soon as I can get it done – so hard with no wifi haha. And then New Zealand afterwards!
PS. This backpack of mine…. Holy shit. I would laugh if I saw me walking around with it, it’s practically bigger than me. I have absolutely no balance whatsoever wearing it. It’s a struggle in itself, if I lean a few cm back or sideways I will fall over. Hahaha, imagine that. I’ve also knocked a few people over with it because in my head it’s not that big. But it is. I look forward to coming to Cairns and being able to throw some stuff out, because this is absolutely ridiculous haha.
See ya peeps


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