Days Four and Five – Apollo – god of All that’s GORGEOUS

When you arrive at your chosen destination after dark it’s a little tricky to get a feel for just how unutterably beautiful a place is.
Of course, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and relative to having spent the previous day with your butt ensconced in a car-seat for hours at a time.
Apollo Bay IS lovely. Our motel unit (one bedroom – 2 beds… can’t remember the last time I shared a room – I think it went well…) was only about 30m from the beach.

Looking at the sea from our room… This is from knee height… I rather liked the look over the leaves… who said blue and green should never be seen?? Wasn’t me…

You can imagine with views like this we weren’t much for getting out of Apollo Bay once we’d got there. I’m always up for exploring but after a day of driving it was nice to get settled and just enjoy the place for a bit…

(embiggen)
This is Apollo Bay. You can see the township in the distance, we were a few km out of town, which suited us well! The town falls midway along the Great Ocean Road. It’s name goes back as far as 1845 when a ship (called the Apollo, of course) sheltered there in the harbour… The road itself runs from Torquay, just out of Geelong to Warnambool. It’s probably as romantic as travelling the Californian Pacific Coast Highway with less ‘America’ and probably a whole lot less lanes, but some of the scenery would give California a run for its money I’d suggest…
The township has all the appeal of any holiday town, a carnival, fish and chip shops and ghastly souvenir shops… actually it had a bit of a feel of an English seaside town, probably only in that its shops all stretch along the road front, the carnival on the green, oh and what looked very much like a Punch and Judy stage there on one occasion!!!
Anyway, for these two days we did little more than venture from the unit to the beach or to town…
Sigh… bliss!
It was wonderful to see the sun set over the ocean again too… as I live on the east coast it’s a but unusual… but we got to look to the west of an evening and we’d catch God with his paintbrush out…

So you don’t have to download all these pix at once… the rest are below… give your browser a chance to breathe!!! (and there are fireworks photos… don’t miss those…!)

Next stop was the carnival. This was on day Four, we went down to get fish and chips for dinner and Shoe patiently waited for me to get my fill of fancy movement shots… I’d like to get more carnival pix… they’re great fun!! And a bit of a challenge in low light and rapid movement…

Last but not least, after a day of lounging around Day 5 was New Years Eve… which ought not to go by without some kind of fireworks… these were flukes taken on slow shutter and time release… 2sec after I press the button it would go off just to avoid camera shake… but it did mean for a bit of ‘pot-luck’. So there were a lot of crap ones before these!!!

So, a belated Happy New Year everyone!!! Looking forward to a whole lot more blogventures with you in ’08!