Day 2 - $13 Pide and 11 Apostles (part 2)

Wow, those who are checking for my posts regularly must hate me now... here it is April 5, my 6th day here, and my last post was on April 2, my third day here, and I haven't even finished talking about day 2!! I haven't even hit the part of my travels that explains the title of the post!!

Oops!

I think it was actually before we saw the Koala that we stopped in Lorne for lunch. WE found a nice juice bar (in this case, 'juice bar' fits the literal meaning). I don't remember the name of the place, but it had an orange awning and looked like any fun hole-in-the-wall coffee shop in The States. You order at the counter, the menu is chalked on the wall, packed full of people. One of those places where you order, then sit, and wait for someone to walk around asking 'Who ordered the Pineapple/Watermellon?' That was the fresh squeezed juice I ordered (and no I don't know how you sqeeze a watermellon).

My drink arrived about the time my coworker had finished his fresh squeezed drink AND breakfast (he had ordered fruit with yogurt and honey). Good thing tipping is not the rule here. Actually, I tend to tip well even with terrible service, but it really is not customary here. In fact, my coworker (I think I mentioned before that my 'coworker' is actually a fellow consultant to the power company that I am here visiting and lives primarily in New Zealand) told me that Aussie's love when Americans show up and tip not knowing that it isn't expected. Now, if service truly is very, very good it is then fine/normal to tip a few dollars, but not our assumed 15-20%. I digress...

The breakfast I ordered, was the $13 Pide (see, I am now explaining the title). If you don't know, like I didn't, or haven't figured it out yet, a Pide is the Australian spelling of what we in America call Pita. the pronunciation is the same. My Pide was a much thicker bread than what I think of as pita, but very tasty. It was covered with smoked salmon and eggs and a small amount of some light sauce. The tastes all worked very well together. My traveling companion just had to sit and wait while I enjoyed myself eating slowly, enjoying the beautiful weather of an early morning at an ocean front restaurant/town.

Pide is not the only major spelling difference I have found. The one that I would have stared at for quite a while had I not heard it pronounced while the TV on the plane had closed captioning on is 'gaol'. How would you pronounce that? Am I just an oblivious, sheltered , midwestern boy? Now, I did not just accidently misspell goal. In fact, 'gaol' is pronounced and means the same thing as 'jail'. I have not been to gaol here, so don't worry, but the old Australian Gaol is one of those other big tourist sights in the Melbourne area. I have not yet gone touring there (and don't know yet if I will manage to).

We finally got back in the car, I was still driving, dealing with the left hand side of the road stuff. In fact I have driven all but 10 meters of the entire trip, all 12+ hours worth. With a few more stops for photos, we finally made it to the spot of the 11 Apostles...



So, in actuallity, the site is called the Twelve Apostles, but since one recently fell over (notice the pile of rockes in the lower left of the photo above) the site is now the Eleven Apostles. The name doesn't really matter, from the site of the visitor's center you can only count 9 or 10 (depending on the strictness of the count). Along the cost of Australia, however, there are multiple dozens of such structures. The natural process that creates them can be seen in this photo of a sign at the sight.



We left the Twelve Apostles and quickly went back on our way worried that we wouldn't make it to Ballarat in enough time to find the substation before dark. We created our own route on the fly and drove through some beautiful fields and country side.(in a very calm rolling hills and big FLAT plains sort of way). If I hadn't already mentioned, Australia (and this area specifically) has had 10 years of below average rain fall. The last five years the country has been under a big drought. The clouds you see in the photos all cleared away and never produced any rain on our drive. In fact, the further fromt he coast we traveled, the fewer the clouds became and the warmer the temperature. With the weather change came the visual verification, by way of endless brown fields of dead grass, or the effect of the drought. Hopefully the rain will come again. They REALLY need it.