newt
Well Known Member
You Americans have it all the wrong way around.
You have a holiday season at the end of December, when the flying weather is at its absolute worst. Slushy roads, closed airports, wind, rain, snow, blurgh. Who needs that?
Down here, we do things the other way around: Sunshine, barbeques on the beach, sunburn and hot weather. Much more satisfactory.
And as we all know, the best way to avoid holiday traffic is to fly over it, so a few months ago my partner and I started planning a holiday season getaway.
She wanted to go to Melbourne to try her luck at the post-Christmas sales that start on the 26th of December. I wanted to fly somewhere pretty spectacular. Put the two together and you end up with the Great Ocean Road. (wikipedia link)
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Some coastlines are what you might call, "gradual," where the land gently slopes into the sea. Others, like the Sounds of western Canada or the Fjords of Norway, you could call "glacial."
For quite a lot of the south of Australia, the best way to describe the coast is, "abrupt." Thousands of kilometers of flat plain end suddenly with sheer limestone and sandstone cliffs topping the ocean hundreds of feet below.
The soft sandstone cliffs erode easily, with tangible changes occurring on human timescales. Coastal features I drove past during family holidays as a child don't exist anymore, or exist in different ways with new different names. You can almost feel the country getting smaller, etched away from the south, craggy geography being turned into sand.
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The Great Ocean Road follows 150 miles of the raw, vertical, south eastern coastline of Australia between Warrnambool in the west and Torquay in the east. (Google Maps links)
Built in the early 20th century, the road was hand-cut into the sandstone as an employment project for veterans of the First World War.
When it isn't clogged up with campervans and holiday traffic, it's one of the world's best driving roads: Twists, turns, switchbacks and causeways following the line of the coast, cliffs on one side of the road and ocean on the other, with every bend hiding some of the most spectacular views imaginable. There's a very good reason it's used to film TV commercials for new cars.
But most drivers don't get to experience it from the air, do they?
You have a holiday season at the end of December, when the flying weather is at its absolute worst. Slushy roads, closed airports, wind, rain, snow, blurgh. Who needs that?
Down here, we do things the other way around: Sunshine, barbeques on the beach, sunburn and hot weather. Much more satisfactory.
And as we all know, the best way to avoid holiday traffic is to fly over it, so a few months ago my partner and I started planning a holiday season getaway.
She wanted to go to Melbourne to try her luck at the post-Christmas sales that start on the 26th of December. I wanted to fly somewhere pretty spectacular. Put the two together and you end up with the Great Ocean Road. (wikipedia link)
---
Some coastlines are what you might call, "gradual," where the land gently slopes into the sea. Others, like the Sounds of western Canada or the Fjords of Norway, you could call "glacial."
For quite a lot of the south of Australia, the best way to describe the coast is, "abrupt." Thousands of kilometers of flat plain end suddenly with sheer limestone and sandstone cliffs topping the ocean hundreds of feet below.
The soft sandstone cliffs erode easily, with tangible changes occurring on human timescales. Coastal features I drove past during family holidays as a child don't exist anymore, or exist in different ways with new different names. You can almost feel the country getting smaller, etched away from the south, craggy geography being turned into sand.
---
The Great Ocean Road follows 150 miles of the raw, vertical, south eastern coastline of Australia between Warrnambool in the west and Torquay in the east. (Google Maps links)
Built in the early 20th century, the road was hand-cut into the sandstone as an employment project for veterans of the First World War.
When it isn't clogged up with campervans and holiday traffic, it's one of the world's best driving roads: Twists, turns, switchbacks and causeways following the line of the coast, cliffs on one side of the road and ocean on the other, with every bend hiding some of the most spectacular views imaginable. There's a very good reason it's used to film TV commercials for new cars.
But most drivers don't get to experience it from the air, do they?