B & T Travels

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Day 19 – July 14 – Geelong, Australia

We had a long but uneventful flight from Honolulu to Auckland and then Auckland to Melbourne. Tari and I had a row to ourselves on the nine-hour flight from Honolulu…

We had a long but uneventful flight from Honolulu to Auckland and then Auckland to Melbourne. Tari and I had a row to ourselves on the nine-hour flight from Honolulu to Auckland which was nice. Our adventure really started when we had to find the shuttle to the airport carpark, locate our car, and figure out how to get it started (we used Turo to rent our car). The shuttle was relatively painless but finding the car and starting it turned out to be a bit of fun in a light rain. Once we had it we then had to navigate new roads (our navigation Apps initially did not work very well when we started out) while driving on the left side of the road. A little over an hour later we found our “tiny home” AirBnB and climbed into bed at 12:30 am, Australia time. It was a 20 hour long day and we were tired.

We got up around 9 am and went out to explore Geelong. We decided to stay here since it is close to the Great Ocean Road, which is the scenic drive along the southern Australian coast we will take tomorrow. We did a 6.5 mile walk which included a large park near the harbor, the harbor area, and the main business area of Geelong. Pictures are below.

We found a croquet club! Had a beautiful lawn that would be great for croquet.
Pier and swimming area but right into the bay/harbor area. Too cold for swimming today but I am sure this is packed in the summer. It included a lap swimming area that would be a great place to train for open water swimming.
You can see some stakes and areas set up for croquet. There were several groups playing later in the morning.

Geelong Sites

We immediately realized that this art work represeneted the moon phases. Tari correctly noticed that the phases move the opposite ways across the moon in the southern hemisphere. They occur in the same order, but the direction the shadows move across the moon is opposite.
A “Baywalk Bollard.” Geelong has these neat wooden statues along the bay that represent historical figures and other significant events in Geelong.
Harbor area of Geelong. Nice waterfront with a few parks, ferris wheel, and lots of shops.
More Baywalk Bollards. This represents a swim coach working with young swimmers at the bay.
As we were walking through the park near the narbor we saw a sign about bats (flying foxes) common in the park. We hoped to see one, we saw a colony with hundreds of them! You can see them hanging in the tree. Numerous trees had more than this. What a site!
An Australian magpie. A common bird here but I thought it looked cool. They are intelligent birds and can remember different human faces for years.
As science teachers we had to include info about the bats.

Cool animals

A crested pigeon. Another common bird but certainly different from the pigeons we usually see.
I think this is a Norfolk Pine. We thought it looked cool but we also saw lots of these in Hawaii. Introduced by humans to different places.
More flying fox information.
I tried to get a closer shot of the bats. We also took some videos that included all the noise the bats made and had some of them flying around. Was a neat experience to see.

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