Day 6 – Phillip Island – Go Karts & Penguins

For everyone’s birthday presents this year, they’re getting experiences while we’re on our trip. And today was my turn to get my birthday present from the fam (from last December) – go karting at the Phillip Island GP Circuit!

Phillip Island GP Circuit has built a smaller sized replica just beside the race tracks for go karts. They have the normal single karts, but also tandem karts for an adult to take a child in. None of our kids were old enough to go on their own unfortunately, so I took each of them for one session each. They loved it! The dual steering in the karts means that the kids do get to steer if they’re able to – Alexander and Eliza didn’t quite have the arm strength to steer entirely on their own, but by halfway through Daniel & my session, he was steering entirely on his own, with me only controlling the speed.

After each of the kids had their tandem go with me, it was time for my turn in a solo kart. Having had the three sessions with the kids, I’d had the chance to at least learn the track well with them – so I enjoyed going absolutely flat out from the moment the session started. And I definitely loved that the solo karts were considerably faster than the tandem karts!

After go karting wrapped up, we decided to head across to The Nobbies, on the far western side of Phillip Island. While we were planning on doing the Nobbies Centre and the Antarctic Journey tomorrow, we thought we’d do the boardwalk and lookout across The Nobbies today, and have our lunch out there. Thankfully the rain continued to hold off, as it had done all morning so far – but it was still super windy, which is pretty much the norm out there. We even managed to see a penguin in its tiny burrow, we think sitting on an egg!

We spent some time back at home during the early afternoon – partly having a break, but partly also letting the kids just enjoy playing in the backyard here, which they were loving.

As the evening arrived, we headed back out to the western side of Phillip Island for the Penguin Parade! We had been looking forward to this for a while. I was amazed at how big the Visitors’ Centre is for the Penguin Parade – but I guess if it runs almost every night all year, that’s a lot of people coming through that centre. It was nice to arrive with plenty of time to wander through looking at all the different displays and information, and the kids really took a lot of it in as well.

We started the walk to the beach at about 5pm. We’d booked the Penguins Plus section, which gave us access to a wooden stand a bit further down the beach from the general admin area. And it was perfect. There were a few people already there, but we still ended up with some really great seats (and the rangers were really helpful with pointing us to the best seats). We can highly recommend getting the Penguins Plus section over the general admin if you ever get the chance to go.

The rain had been really good to us all day – but a little bit of a drizzle had started now. Nothing major though. It was quite a bit of a wait until the penguins arrived, but it really didn’t feel long at all. And the kids were amazingly patient. Then the penguins arrived at about 6:15pm – so many of them, and they just kept coming! It was amazing to watch their behaviours as they waited for their mates, or didn’t want to get left behind. It was interesting to see that quite a few people left after about only 2o mins or so, even though there were so many penguins still coming in. But it did mean we got to shift to a couple of different vantage points.

As the penguin numbers slowed down, and the rain really started to set in a bit, we decided it was time for us to start the walk back to the visitors centre. And along the walk back, we tried to spot a few penguins off the side of the boardwalk, but the rain was getting pretty heavy by now! We made it back into the Visitors’ Centre, where the kids wanted to look through the shop, after they’d spied some very cute looking penguin toys on the way out. They all wanted to spend some of their travel money, but we hadn’t brought it with us – so we agreed that we’d come back tomorrow afternoon if they really wanted to buy something. We figured that would also help with giving them an opportunity to decide whether they really wanted something, rather than just the excitement of being there in the moment.

Another drenching as we headed back to the car, but thankful that we got a chance to use our new rain jackets so early into the trip! It was then time for a late dinner and bed for pretty much all of us. Considering how much waiting around there was tonight, the kids were just brilliant. And we’re so glad they loved the experience.