So far the most entertaining part of the trip was explaining to the instructors why we showed up 2.5 hours late the first day. It's a bit of a long story.
We were in staff training on Thursday and we were discussing how we would leave for the course sometime Friday evening because the course started on Saturday. I had a weird thought in my head that I had seen something that said the course started on Friday so I sent an email to the people running the course and sure enough, it began on Friday morning at 9am. So we decided there that we would get up nice and early and make the drive to Bright in the morning. We were told the drive would take us about an hour and a half.
Everything went fine Friday morning, we woke up on time, piled into the car and started off on the road. We turned on the GPS and punched in Bright. As we drove towards the first major town off of the mountain, the GPS indicated that we should be making a right turn and when we missed that turn, that we should be making a U-turn. So we turned around and followed the directions given to us. Very shortly after our turn-off the road we were travelling on turned from bitumen to dirt which all lead us to be suspicious but who were we to doubt the GPS. Eventually the road became more and more bumpy but we still figured that it would only be a for a short while before we ended up back on paved roads. At this point we are still travelling on course according to our GPS. Next thing we know we are travelling down a steep 4x4 track with cliffs on either side of the road. Luckily for us we were travelling in a Subaru that did a very admirable job scaling this track. The problem was that there was only a slim chance we'd ever get back up that hill if we needed to so we continued on following the GPS directions.
After following instructions for a little while longer we reached a fork in the road. At this point we are all seriously doubting the abilities of our GPS unit and decided to flip a coin to determine which way to go. The coin came up tails so we turned left traveled a few hundred metres (still on the GPS path) before we encountered a felled tree across the road. At this point the road is completely unpassable because of the tree. So we turned around and tried the other option. This took us down a decent track for a while past some day shacks in the forest before we found a creek crossing the road. We made it through the creek before making a ways up a muddy road before finally deciding that all our efforts to make it through this direction were going to be futile. The problem was our only option now was to get back up the extremely harsh and steep track that we barely successfully descended.
After negotiating a difficult U-turn (narrow roads) we turned back towards our first mistake (turn off the main road). We managed to actually make it back up the track with less difficulty than we expected, but that by no means we had no difficulty. I think we were just desensitzed to difficult driving at this point. So finally after about 90 minutes in the bush we managed to get back to a bitumen road and we decided to take the long circuitous (the correct) route to Bright from Mt Buller. Our next problem was that the drive to Bright actually takes two and a half hours instead of the one and a half we were anticipating. After adding it all up we were 2.5 hours late.
Now, on our first night the instrutors came over and started asking us where we got lost, because in all seriousnous, it's hard to get as lost as we did. So we began explaining to them how we were following the GPS and we thought the road might turn back to something passable and that we figured we weren't able to turn back (as we were explaining it, our reasoning began to appear as flawed to us as it really was). The instructors still were not quite buying our story (and later told us that they figured we stopped at a winery). That was of course until I brought out my camera and showed them the one photo we took of the entire fiasco. At this point there was uproarious laughter and finally some acceptance of our explanation. Good times.
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