Report No 6

From Mt Gambier (South Australia) we visited the Ewens Ponds - a rather cold spring forming 3 ponds with water-channels in between. It's a very nice spot to snorkel through.

Our next stop was the Grampians National Park in Victoria where we stayed for 8 days. Lovely mountains, ideal for hiking, with not too many people around and without cell phone reception. Here we did many hikes and enjoyed the lovely forests and scenery.

Unfortunately there was a fire destroying a big part of the park. That part of the park was closed to the public.

As always, nature takes over once again and one sees the fresh green leaves pushing through the burnt vegetation.

After the Grampians NP we drove south to the Great Ocean Road. Here we saw more tourists than ever on our whole trip!

It surely is BIG business with bus-loads of people, helicopter scenic flights and restaurant. Our shocked children tried to say hello to everyone, but they gave up after a while :-)

Our last destination before Melbourne was the Wilsons Promontory. It's a very nice park that provided us with pictures, we hadn't seen so far! We saw plenty of wombats, hundreds of kangaroos grazing on an abandoned airfield, wallabies, echidnas and much more. Even though the weather wasn't too great, we could do some nice hikes.

After 5 days at Wilsons Prom. a 2-3 hours drive took us back to the place where we started our journey, back to Oli, Irma, Gita and Tiana :-)
After being on the road for over 5 months it felt right and great to be back and to enter the last phase of this project. We had a lovely time together with our Aussie-family and we will miss this terribly when back in Switzerland! We also got our vehicles ready for sale and did a major job with cleaning.

Soon it was time to say good-bye! We are looking forward to see our friends sometime and somewhere in the world!

The flight back to Europe with Emirates was absolutely fine. Very nice staff and flight attendants, perfect food and entertaining-system, nice plane - we were very happy! For boarding they picked out families with children, disabled and elderly people to board first :-) Further, all our children got a nice present with pens, colouring-in books and many things more. The flight attendants also went through the plane with a Polaroid camera (instant pictures) and took a photo of every child to hand over a souvenier. (Laila afterwards went to a stewardess to say thank you. She only returned after a long time ... with this :-)

And comparing this with other airlines like Quantas ... ohh boy! Quantas needs to learn A LOT!

At the end of April 2014 we were all very happy to be back in our home in Ottenbach and we are also very happy with what we did over the last couple of months. It was a unique time for all of us! :-)

In the meantime everyone settled back in to the every days routine. But to finish off the 'project' some things still need to be 'solved' such as finding a good job (Alex) and selling our vehicles.

Thank you for following our journey! Maybe we will see you at our slideshow. Would be nice :-) Don't forget to let us have your pre-notification ;-)

Ottenbach, 30th of June 2014.

Here a few more photos :-)