Day 122 : Chopper Tastic

Port Fairy to Lorne

High Point : Hanging out of a helicopter filming the fire engine cruising down the Great Ocean Road

Favourite Bit of Rock : London Bridge

Blog Blockage : After 4 months of nagging every crew member to get their blog done on time I have fallen guilty of “blog blockage”, I can only apologise

Martha had a real treat today. Much of the Australian’s roads have been uber straight. In the outback you can drive for hours and hours without a sniff of  even a bend so you can imagine our excitement at giving the old girl a good thrashing along the Great Ocean Road. It is a 243km road hacked into the coastline of Victoria, winding and climbing through some very funky landscapes with every turn offering up another visual feast.

Now you must have seen by now that the boys on the trip are sporting some magnificent moustaches in support of Movember (a moustache growing charity event held during November each year that raises funds and awareness for men’s health). We have seen some beauties on our travels across Australia but none better than the collection we stumbled upon at the 12 Apostles Helicopter base. Barham and I popped in to see if they wanted to get involved with some filming of Martha trucking down the Great Ocean Road. It was quite the shock to enter a room with 10 dudes each donning an absolute crackerjack of a tash. With myself and Barham adding to the heavy tash count it was looked like an RAF briefing in the second world war!   United by good causes, the pilots kindly offered to take us up in a helicopter for the filming for free. Moments later I was hovering over the 12 Apostles with Martha bumbling along, sweet!!  Beauty!

The FTFE expedition has wonderful momentum at the moment. Donations are coming in thick and fast and we getting great exposure for the charities on the media over here. The amount of admin seems to be increasing exponentially everyday as we truck on through Australia. Pretty much every waking hour is now either driving or admin which is certainly compounding the levels of exhaustion for the crew. I never thought I would ever get excited about spending time on a shipping container (we sail in early December but with the shipping comes SLEEP!! I can’t wait!!!)

Behind the scenes : as always a million and one things are happening behind the scenes. On top of the admin that the stage 5 crew smash through, things are really ramping up elsewhere for Team FTFE. Shipping, logistics, routing, media, charity fund raisers, web development… the list goes on. You know who you are guys, huge thanks.

Rock on

Steve

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