Longstride

A physically lazy day in Nelson, we still got a lot of logistics work accomplished.

Nelson

• CareFree and I were slow to get up this morning, partially because I was (very unusually) restless last night.
• The hotel staffer that very helpfully agreed to pick up our food from the Woolworths in Mount Gambier arrived shortly before 11, and we quickly unloaded our groceries.
• We stopped by the nearby information center, and got tide information for the next several days. The GSWW continues along the beach along Discovery Bay, and the tides look good: low tide should be around noon, tomorrow, so we shouldn’t have much of a problem with high water.
• The info center also had wifi, which we made use of throughout the day.
• We went to the nearby gas station for breakfast. I got a toasted chicken and cheese sandwich, which was surprisingly good.
• We returned to the hotel and repacked our food for the hike out tomorrow.
• After returning to Portland and resting for a few days, we’ll head to Apollo Bay to begin the Great Ocean Walk, a roughly 100 km trail. But, we had two full days in Portland before taking transportation to Apollo Bay, and lodging was looking expensive, so we considered other options. We first looked into pulling the GOW forward one day, which would give us an extra day in Australia afterwards, but one of the campsites was fully booked on the day we’d need it, so that didn’t work. Instead, we re-booked the latter half of the GSWW to Portland, cutting a 30 km day into two days. CareFree commented this felt like cheating, but, we’re on vacation, it doesn’t all have to be hard.
• We booked a hotel in Portland for two nights instead of three, giving us one rest day to resupply in Portland before heading back out for more hiking.
• We attempted to book our transportation from Portland to Apollo Bay, but couldn’t. Asking at the information center, they gave us the name of a place in Portland that would be able to handle all the booking for us.
• We took a short walk around town, visiting the waterfront along the river, and checking out a small viewing platform atop a comically short “lookout” hill, that wasn’t even the highest ground in town.

View from Lookout Hill

• Dinner at the hotel, a turkey breast roast with veggies, was exceptionally good.

Sunset over the Glenelg River

• My power bank (that I got less than a year ago in Wellington because my previous one stopped charging my watch) is definitely broken. It charged, but now completely refuses to output any power at all, so it’s basically a useless paperweight until we get back to New Zealand and I can try and have it replaced — it actually has a two year warranty! Hopefully, the gas station here has a small battery I can buy so that we’re not reliant entirely on CareFree’s battery.