It took us awhile to get out of Melbourne, we tried driving past the Docklands first, then we were off to the Yarra Valley and the Dandenong Range.
This is supposed to be Wine Valley and such, only I haven’t seen a single one and we are wasting our time wandering around the curvy mountain roads (its more like NZ now, curvy mountain roads, but these are paved, and a full two lanes).
Into Healesville for coffee. Tim and I got more treatment and toothpaste, mom in search to the bakeries, she wanders far, saying that there was no coffee in the windows. Its like, its not coffee, and why would they put an espresso maching in the window? So we went into a fish and chips shop for coffee. It’s a fish and chips shop, and mom proceeds to specialty order her coffee. Its like treating Blue Moon like a Starbucks.
We found the Rochford Vineyard, and decided to go in. There was a café and restaurant attached, we looked at the menu, and the eating area looked nice and cozy, so we sat down to eat. There was a fudge counter right at the front, and one of the fudges that they had was a caramel apple fudge. Yum. After we ordered, Tim showed me where the actual dessert cooler was, and holy cow did they look absolutely amazing. There was a pear cake, and a chocolate cake that looked absolutely to die for.
Mom first got a trio of wines and vegetarian lasagna that was absolutely delicious. I could have eaten a whole pan of it. Slightly sweet with the squash, lots of veggies. Delicious. I ordered the soup of the day and a side salad. The cucumbers and tomatos though, those were juicy and delicious. I also had the vegetable soup, which wasn’t like regular veggie soup, but pureed veggies, like pumpkin and squash and celery. It was absolutely delicious. After the restaurant, we went to another winery Stoneridge only a few miles down the road. Mom was pretty much done with wine, but its like, we did not drive all this way to go to a café inside one winery. Huge waste. The view from the place was absolutely gorgeous. It was atop a hill and you can see in all directions form it. We went inside, and the guy was super cute, I thought he was a bit pushy, but both Mom and Tim commented afterwards that they didn’t feel pressured at all. I didn’t try any, but Tim tried a Souvignon Blanc, a desert wine, and a whiskey based wine. The guy kept talking on and on about the different wines, different grapes and just lots of facts and such. I totally tuned out, but the guy was totally into it.
We were racing the clock. We made it to the Koala Conservation at 4:25. And it closed at 5, so we had half an hour once we got our tickets to get through. The guy said that we could still do the walkway, but Tim and I felt that it was a total ripoff, because usually “walkway” is just looking at trees and birds and stuff. We got to the place where the Koalas were, and it was a walkway less than 10 feet off the ground, and we spotted the first Koala right away. He was faced away, and sleeping, so we moved on, found another one, much closer to the ground where we were, but again, asleep and facing away.
Then, we found an awake one. Kind of high up, but still visible from numerous angles. He was looking at us, and then decided to crawl down his branch, and move to a different branch to reach some leaves, and then down to mere feet away from us, and crawl up a different branch. It was really weird, it was uglier than I expected it to be, but still cute in the ugly way.
Mom bought the better seats for the Penguin Parade, and when I saw the numbers of penguins from the night before, I actually got pretty excited, there were 1285 the night before. That is a LOT of penguins. It was quite windy and chilly, I was hoping the penguins would make an early ocean exit. There was one penguin that was super early, and it was so small and cute! The ranger said that that’s as big as they get, they are the Little Penguins, the smallest penguisn that exist. We had to wait awhile, but finally the penguins arrived. One or two, and tehn a massive clump of them. It was hilarious! And totally awesome. The better seats were well well worth it, they were right there along the walkway of the penguins. They went right in front of us, or right up the hill and you could watch that. We watched for 20 minutes, the noises of and squawking of them kept getting louder and louder. It was really weird nosie, they sounded like they were sick or hurt or being murdered. But it just kept getting louder and louder. There were so many penguins. We saw burrowns on the way down to the seats, and the ranger said that it was the home of some 60,000 penguins. They just kept coming in droves, resting right at our corner before they walked on, preening.
They stayed in their tight group though, waddling super fast to catch up. We all got a little too cold and followed a group all the way up the walkway, listening to the super loud noises. They were everywhere, you could see them on both sides of the walkway, in the bushes, in the hillside. It was insane. Penguins everywhere! They even had roped off part of the sidewalk by the Visitor Center since they were crossing right over the sidewalk.
As you leave the center, there are signs telling you to check under your car for penguins before you pulled out. This was exciting, because I really wanted to get a picture of one (since you couldn’t photograph in the park at all) and I ended up getting a somewhat decent picture of one from the car as we pulled out of the lot. 
It’s a dark drive, but the darkness is nowhere near as dark here as it is in New Zealand. Nowhere near it. Pretty chill evening once we got back. We decided to start early tomorrow, and be back early since we have a pretty early flight on Friday morning. Midnight here already somehow. I was super tired around 9, and now I am wide awake. Ugh. They are in bed. Probably both asleep already.
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