I'm not sure that the Great Ocean Road, on Victoria's south coast, was the best place to start.  It's a spectacular drive, or so Carol tells me, with lots of twists and turns and cliffside vistas.  I'm just glad we upgraded the rental car to an automatic transmission.

It's usually not that hard to remember that you're supposed to be on the left hand side, it's mostly those awkward moments when you go to put on your turn signals and get the windshield wipers instead, or when you go to shift gears and start rolling down your window.  And then there's that annoying little thing about the mirrors not being in the right place.

It's been four months since I've driven a vehicle, and as I think about it, most of the places we've been to, I wouldn't want to have attempted driving anyway.

January 5 -- Today we visited a place called Hanging Rock, which is actually many rocks, a big hill of jumbled rocks all tossed together with trails and caves and great views of the Victoria countryside.  You could wander around here for hours, which we did, until Heather and Elspeth got hungry and cracked open the picnic lunch.  We had come to the park with our old friend Cam Ford and his two daughters.

Hanging Rock is a place where, on a school outing on February 14th, 1900, four young girls "disappeared" for hours.  One was never found and the others had no recollection of what happened to them.  I figure the aliens got 'em.  This whole event later became the subject of Peter Weir's film Picnic at Hanging Rock.  Our picnic was a lot less eventful.