The Great Ocean Walk - Prequel

Sometimes you don't know how much you can achieve until you push yourself past your comfort zone and into new territory.  Our most recent adventure was a 6-day, 91 kilometre hike called The Great Ocean Walk.  Many people are familiar with the Great Ocean Road, which is supposedly the most scenic drive in Australia, just west of Melbourne.

The map below shows the Great Ocean ROAD, but the walking trail followed the coast most of the time.  For a map of what we actually hiked, look here.

If you've been reading this blog for awhile, then you know that although Ryan and I like nature we tend to avoid extreme nature experiences.  Usually we use time as the excuse because we like to cover a lot of ground in a short amount of time, but really I think it's just easier to travel by car and hotel, and it takes a lot less planning and training.  Not this time!  The Great Ocean Road didn't appeal to us for some reason, but since it was one of those "must-do" Australian experiences, we decided to do it our way. 

As I said, a trip like this requires a lot of planning.  Instead, I found a company called Walk 91 that books everything for you!  We booked flights and a car, they planned our walking itinerary, booked our camp sites,  booked one night accommodation in the middle of the hike,  and coordinated food/gear drops and transportation.  This appealed to us since our camping gear isn't really "backpacking" gear, so it wouldn't have been ideal to carry that and food for 6 days. 

Although that bit was easy to plan, we still had to decide on food for the trip.  In the past this would have been easy, but since going Paleo it presented more of a challenge.  You all know me, so instead of taking the easy way out I decided to see how close to Paleo we could get for the entire trip, which meant no easy pasta or granola bars.  Lucky for me one of my coaching clients offered to lend me her dehydrator, so I got to work weeks ahead dehydrating as much as I could in preparation.  I did tons of beef jerky, squash, broccoli, apples, fruit bark, and even some rice (which was actually as non-Paleo as we got).  I also made bags of home made nut granola, chia seed porridge, and bought some awesome tuna and coconut butter online.  I won't lie, I would have liked to just do it the old way but it was very satisfying when it was all done.  Plus I knew we would need every last ounce of energy on the trip, and I wasn't letting gluten take that away from me!

So Friday night Ryan came home, and Saturday we packed everything.  Over the past 2 weeks we had been coordinating our meals and packing lists in a Google doc, so packing was really easy.  We even had time to relax on Saturday before our Sunday departure.  It worked out well since it was daylight savings that weekend, so we got an extra hour of sleep on Sunday morning and a lazy trip to the airport for our 9:40am flight.  Much better than the usual 6am ones!  The trip was uneventful since both Ryan and I bought new books at the airport.  Once in Melbourne we picked up our car and drove straight to Geelong (1 hour away) to have lunch and do some grocery shopping.

Geelong was a nice town on the ocean, but we couldn't really decide what to have for lunch so we ended up at a Thai place.  Our first clue should have been that no one was at the restaurant, but we weren't thinking straight I guess.  Our appetizer came to us with raw chicken so we obviously sent that back, and the mains tasted good but made us feel queasy afterwards. 

Grocery shopping didn't go much better for us.  We should have just started at the biggest store, but instead we thought we'd see what we could find at the health food shop.  We didn't find much, so we went to the IGA next door which was pretty derelict, so we still had to go to the third major grocery store.  We got everything we wanted, but it took a lot more time than it should have and we were pretty fried by the end of it.  Much to our dismay, what we thought was a 20 minute drive to Apollo Bay turned out to be 2 hours (don't know where Ryan got the 20 minutes from).  At least it was a nice drive along the ocean, but it was also quite a windy road which is never good for me.

With our hotel (Beacon Point Ocean View Villas) only 3 km away, we turned off of the highway onto a (still major) side road.  The front tire on the driver's side started to make a weird clacking noise, so thinking it was a stick or something caught there we drove to our hotel and got out to take a look.  Unfortunately, we had run over 2 nails.  The clacking noise was the piece of plastic the nails had been attached to.  Darn!  Since by then it was getting dark we decided to see how it looked in the morning.  As it happened, the spare tire was exactly the same as the normal tire, so the next morning we just changed it and didn't worry about it any more.  Funny enough, for the first time ever we paid for the extra insurance on the car.  Of course that's the time something goes wrong!  Luckily working at the mines we have changed many tires, so it was no big deal.

  

Even after all of the car drama was sorted on Saturday night, we still had to repack everything for the next day and sort all of our food bags.  I forgot to get a picture with all of the food laid out on the floor, but here's the finished product.

We were exhausted after we finished packing, and didn't want to drive on our potentially flat tire, so we ended up just eating random stuff that we bought instead of going out for a nice dinner.  We had been hoping to get one nice meal in before we hiked, but we just started our meal rations a bit early! 

So as you can see, before the hike even started it was an adventure!