Fri. 26th Oct., 2012 - Portland to Clifton Springs!

Portland

It had rained again overnight but the sky began to brighten as we drove out of Portland at 10am.  The countryside was green, so we guessed they'd had a fair amount of wet weather.

We passed a group of vintage cars (Bentleys), probably going to a rally & agreed that modern living has lost a lot of its elegance & style - these 'oldies' had charm & character & were still running very smoothly.  We saw more of them as the day wore on.

We stopped to make coffee in historic Port Fairy but, unfortunately, the weather prevented us from renewing our aquaintance with this lovely little town & we continued on towards Warrnambool.

Place names were now becoming familiar - for example, we saw a sign to Tower Hill, one of our favourite wildlife venues.  The countryside was very lush & green & dairy cattle were grazing on the rich pasture.  The sun came out as we entered Warrnambool but the temperature was still only 14C.  This is a big town but one that we only ever seem to drive through en-route to somewhere else.

We passed a sign to Framlingham, a place name I've never before seen outside of Norfolk, in the UK.

It became really wet & murky as we drove towards Colac & the temperature dropped to 11C, which even made Queensland seem more appealing!  An absolute deluge occurred at one point & we hoped that this weather wasn't moving towards Clifton Springs.

Camperdown brought back vague memories of quilting shops.  As we drove out of the town, several cherry trees were displaying their beautiful pink blossom.

The rain turned into a constant downpour & Bob had to increase the speed of the windscreen wipers.  The past two days have been the only ones when he has driven in such continuous rain.  Even in Adelaide, four months ago, the wet weather had occurred just before our arrival & we'd only seen the aftermath.  I thought of how they would have loved this, in some of the arid places that we'd been!  We've had enough now, God - please redirect it to the desert areas!

The rain eased a little as we drove out of Colac, but the sky was still very grey.  We didn't expect any major improvement - in fact, it looked even worse in the far distance.  And, sure enough, it did worsen & poor visibility became a serious problem.

We pulled in at Winchelsea to have some soup for lunch &, miraculously, the rain stopped!  God had heard my plea &, hopefully, He was moving the wet weather to where it was most needed.  What a relief! 

As we set off again, we could at least see clearly ahead & Bob was able to have a little respite from the wipers.  A significant amount of blue sky appeared & Geelong lay ahead, most of it bathed in sunshine!  The fact that diesel was only $1.46 per litre was almost as uplifting as the sunshine - this was the cheapest we'd seen it for four months!  We were now in the biggest metropolis we'd experienced for ages & were forced to stop at more traffic lights than we'd come across during the whole of the rest of our trip (this might not be strictly true, but that was the way it seemed).  It was hard driving straight past "Spotlight", but I exercised extreme self control.  A new bridge took us over the Barwon River & we headed for home with renewed vigour (staying within the speed limit, of course!)

Our house was still where we'd left it & three lovely little girls came across to welcome us home!  Tomorrow, I will draw this blog to a conclusion but, for today, enough is enough.