Cape Schanck Adventure!

This past weekend, the Wife and I took our first road trip together! We rented a cute, little Hyundai Getz and departed around 9:30 am to Cape Schanck, armed with our Melways map, Google Maps directions and our picnic basket. The drive was rather uneventful, just a long, fairly straight freeway heading all the way south to the tip of Mornington Peninsula. Along the way, we listened (and sometimes sang along) to some of the Wife's CDs which contained a mix of 80's and 90's Tamil and Hindi songs. I hadn't heard some of those songs in a really long time so it was quite fun to relive some memories of my childhood and adolescence!

We reached Cape Schanck around 10:30 am. It was a fairly cloudy morning with lots of wind as expected. After rugging up with a couple of layers of insulation, we headed off to do the Cape Schanck Boardwalk, a short walk of about a km or so down to the ocean rocks. Or rather, I should say Strait rocks because the water body at Cape Schanck is called Bass Strait, which separates mainland Australia (i.e. Victoria) from Tasmania. We had a little walk along some of the rocks towards Pulpit Rock, a large, nearly cuboid mass of rock that stands on its own at the Cape. Along the way, we were amazed at the ferocity of the waves crashing into the nearby rocks. You can see a video of the waves and our amazement attached below. The Wife had a bit of a play with the freezing water that came rushing towards us as well.

After taking in the sights and sounds of the Cape, we trekked back to our car for a quick lunch of sandwiches, before plotting our way to our next pit stop, Arthur's Seat. A friend of mine had told me that this place had terrific views of Port Philip Bay and we had seen the mountain (or rather hill!) on our way into Cape Schanck earlier. We drove straight to the Summit Lookout, which was at an elevation of 305 m, not impressive, but the views of Port Philip Bay were indeed spectacular! We did not have the best weather conditions so we could only vaguely make out the Melbourne city skyline (~ 70 km away) from our lookout. I was surprised by the strong winds that blew constantly at us on the lookout mountain! For a very modest elevation, we were being subjected to a constant stiff wind of ~ 30 km/h I reckon!

We took a walk around the Arthur's Seat walking trail, and saw Arthur's Seat (indeed, there was a seat!), Matthew Flinders' mount, and the Seawinds Garden. It was a good 2 km hike in all. We returned to our car park area, a little bit tired, so we went in to Arthur's Hotel for a quick coffee and some warm scones (delicious!). Satisfied with our day and the refreshments, we climbed back into our little car for the hour-long trip back home. A day well spent in the natural beauty of Victoria! It simply made us thirsty to do more such road trips in the future...and so there shall be more! :-)

Here is a link to some pictures we took on our road trip, and you can find a video of the waves at Cape Schanck at the very bottom of this post.

http://picasaweb.google.com.au/manoj.sridhar/CapeSchanckTrip25July2009#