Day 22: East Melbourne to Geelong to ferry to Tasmania

We started the day in Drouin, a town east of Melbourne, eating breakfast with our friends. I was nauseous and wondered how I was going to cope with the day, but in retrospect I think it was mostly anxiety. This was the big day: the day we'd paid a lot of money to catch a ferry to Tasmania. Yes, now you finally know where we have been headed as our "major destination".

It was also my birthday, but that was a minor point!

Where we parked for the night before
we boarded the ferry, our friend's driveway.
We joked about trimming their tree for them! 

We drove to Geelong, through the centre of Melbourne, but via "the high road" (expressway). It was surprisingly painless! When we got to Geelong we found a free place to park, ate lunch in the motorhome, and then I had a lie down (this I'd been doing at every opportunity during these days when I was under the weather). David took a walk down by the esplanade. After he came back I roused myself and we went for another walk, this time to get some motion sickness tablets from a pharmacy, in preparation for the Bass Straight crossing.

At 3.30 we headed to the Spirit of Tasmania (name of the boat) pier to line up to board the ferry. It brought back many memories of doing this in Japan, most notably when we caught a car ferry to do a camping trip in Hokkaido eleven years ago (see here). It was exciting to finally be on board, this was a trip that we'd been planning since early last year, so it's been a long time coming.

It was a pretty grey day in Geelong.
This is the car park
we spent the afternoon in near the esplanade.

I knew that my radiology results were available that afternoon, so, in the midst of everything else going on, I tried to get in to the same online doctor service I'd spoken with two days earlier. I waited in a virtual line for hours, not knowing if they'd even be able to call me if we were in the middle of Bass Straight. But in the end I fell asleep enroute to Tasmania after 9.30pm, missing their call by only half an hour, it was very frustrating.

Lining up to board the ferry

Our journey