Port Campbell

After a very windy night, where Dave was up a couple of times tying down the tarps, he went and checked the line he had left out and discovered he had caught a nice bream.

Today we have been on a bit of a gourmet food trip around the area. We headed north to Timboon. Our first stop was Timboon Farmhouse Cheese. When we arrived we discovered it is actually called Mousetrap. The new proprietor is French, so he had some local and French cheese to taste and buy. We tasted them all...mmmmmm and bought 3. We then drove onto the Whiskey Distillery. We had a bit of a look around. No-one seemed too keen to ask us if we needed to see or taste anything. The whole place was more like a cafe with a still in the corner. The bottles for sale on the shelf were pretty expensive and all were flavoured, not plain old whiskey, so we left and continued on our way.

The next stop was at a town called Simpson, where we stopped for a picnic lunch in an interesting park that had info about soldier settlements after the 2nd WW. Thousands of hectares were cleared using tractors with huge steel balls attached. They just drove through everything ripping out all the vegetation. It looked pretty ghastly on the photos, but now the whole area is a patchwork of beautiful green padddocks...lots of dairy cattle.

Just outside Simpson was a place called Gum Valley Patchwork. The woman who usually runs it was in Melbourne for some big quilt show, so her husband was looking after it for the day. I enjoyed looking at the quilts while dave talked to the bloke about the building it was all in, and his dairy farm. There were huge patches in the lawns of their garden, plus out in the paddocks, where crows had literally dug up huge turfs and clods of soil looking for grubs.

We continued down the road to Apostle way Cheese, where we again tasted the full range of cheeses and bought 2 more. There were a feew quirky bits and pieces in the gardens and on the tank.

Not far down the road was G.O.R.G.E. Chocolates. Of course we had to stop and have a taste. They make the chocolates on the premises. I've seen them for sale in a few places along the Great Ocean Road. We bought some delicious dark choc with ginger inside.

As we came back into Port campbell, we stopped at the local Museum. Most of the museums down here have stories and artifacts from shipwrecks. There were many down this way in the 1800s. Many were ships full of people headed for the goldfields. They had been at sea for about 80 days without seeing land. When they got to Bass Strait they often headed in at night and came to grief on rocks on the coast and King Island, instead of waiting for daylight.

Dave has just gone fishing again. He caught one last night. A good-sized bream.