Day 2

April 27, 2011- Day 2

Where: Healesville to Venus Bay

Dinner: Hobo baked beans with poached eggs in it

Aussie animals and a long obnoxious drive to the elusive campground

     Oh gosh, what a long day. Woke up at 8am because we knew it would take us a while to eat and get packed up. Made it to Healesville and used the good 'ol Husky Card to pay the student price. Such a good idea to leave that in the wallet! The sanctuary was pretty cool. More like a zoo than I expected though. The wombat was sleeping which was very disappointing, but we did see a tasmanian devil which is a pretty interesting animal. The roos were all feeling very lazy in the sun and we only saw one really do much hopping. When they stand up they are really big! I'm sure we'll see more along the way which would be good because I feel like we could have had a better first encounter with the legendary animals. Saw some more koalas and this time they were very close. I'm in love! Seriously the cutest animals ever. Too bad they are too mean to hold :( After Healesville we stopped at the White Rabbit Brewery and Pat had a pint of ale at the restaurant next door.

     We visited an info center to get directions down to the southern coast. We called the National Park Info number and they told us about a free campground down on Cape Liptrap. Sounded easy enough to get to and was only supposed to be about a two hour drive We left around 6 with me driving. Pat is a great navigator and we decided that setup is probably the best because he is a more chill passenger and I'm a better driver than navigator most of the time. We had some good maps but it turns out that Cape Liptrap has a lot of small roads on it and we drove for well over two hours without ever finding the free campground. We had driven that far and we were determined not to pay for camping. We were driving on narrow windy roads and one point we ended up on a dirt road that was covered in washboard. Kindof creepy when it's dark and you don't really know where you are and you just want to sleep! It turns out Pat is afraid of being out “in the middle of no where” in the dark. His imagination gets the worst of him I think. So far I've been the encouraging one when it comes to doing things in the dark. So we finally just decided to sleep in a beach parking lot hidden from street view. There was another van camping there so we decided it would be fine. We were cold and tired so we just made baked beans from a can and poached some eggs in it. We got in the van and ate straight from the pot. Haha, we called it hobo beans. Pretty tasty though actually. We didn't get out of the van after that and instead just went to sleep. There was no bathroom so when I woke up at 6am I had to pee! We set our alarm for 7 because we wanted to leave before we thought a park ranger might come by. Neither of us slept very well at all. We left at 6:45 and went a bit further down the beach to Venus Bay. A long exhausting day. Pat and I are both being pushed out of our comfort zone which I guess is a good thing. I didn't really think about that when planning the trip, but it is a lot of new experiences for both of us.