It takes time to adjust, but worth it

I’M still not sure about this daylight saving thing being only a few weeks into the full experience.

Having spent all of my days in Queensland until this year, the way each day looks now, in October at 7pm, like the peak of a summer day in bananaland, it’s quite jarring.

While I might start getting used to it now, I think there will still be more to come once summer really starts kicking in here.

I will say it gives me and my lovely fiancee some flexibility in our plans, considering we are certainly not morning people.

It was nice last weekend to have our usual Saturday sleepin, run a few errands in the late morning, and decide around noon that it was a nice enough day to head to the Otways, and that we would have enough light until around 8pm.

Personally, having been down the Great Ocean Road a few times (more than I can say for at least one of my Addy colleagues, a local who I am reliably informed hasn’t ventured that way), we took the inland route via Colac and took the time to wind through ‘the back way’ to the Twelve Apostles. You wouldn’t believe there is a drought in western Victoria driving through all the pasture, though I’m told under the general greenness there’s nothing in the water table. Hopefully the rain this week started to make some inroads. Once we got to the big rocks, there were thousands of people there, plenty of overseas visitors, which was good to see from a tourism perspective, despite having to get the elbows out to get an ideal view — more so for my fiancee, who was on her first drive of the great stretch. Fortunately, there are ways to get away from the crowds, and my fiancee has become quite the wildlife spotter. We didn’t need experts to tell us echidnas were out in force, we spotted two on the way to and from Thunder Cave, adding to one we’d seen touring the Otways again a week earlier.

Granted, we didn’t see EVERYTHING, but the beauty is it’s just down the road, a few hours away, and we will become tour guides to visiting family members from up north no doubt. At the moment, the only negative I can think of is how late I will have to stay up (or the new camera equipment I will need to buy) to take photos of lightning to satisfy my storm-chasing habit.

As good as it feels to get a great shot, like those hearty photographic souls on the Bellarine who captured some beauties at 2am, as seen in the Addy earlier this week, I like my sleep too much.