ooohh.. what? an update?? no way

It’s been forever since I’ve updated this travel blog and I don’t even know if people are reading it anymore. I also think that I probably start the majority of these posts with that line. Anyways, don’t get your hopes up, there’s not going to be any pictures because the internet connection that I have is pretty slow but I’m going to try and write a few posts as our trip winds down just to finish it off.

I think the last thing that I might have written about was the Margaret River trip but I don’t think I’m going to try and think about what came after that and do it in any sort of order because it’s been a long time. I’m just going to write a bit about our road trip.

As a side note, it’s April 13th today which means there’s 8 days left on our trip and we spent last night sleeping in the car and I don’t think that I’ve been this cold yet here. I’m FREEZING…like feet, hands, nose…everything. If I wasn’t warming warm pants and a sweater wrapped in my favorite junior size sleeping bag I’d probably be dead. I think Canada’s weather may actually kill me.

Alright, so road trip. We rented the car on I think February 22nd with the intention of having it in Sydney on the 16th of April. That gave us just over a month in the car checking everything out and exploring. We got on the road and it was doing nothing but raining. I guess though it was the wet season so we should have expected it…but we had no idea. We drove around Cairns for a few days checking out Port Douglas, this cute little tiny town Karrunda I think. They had some amazing waterfalls there and also a really cool market. After Cairns we headed down the coast. We didn’t do it very slowly. We made some days just driving days and got down the coast fast. We stopped at Emerald, so that I could take a photo of their ridiculous van gough painting that matches the one in Altona. We stopped at Mission Beach where we set up our tent for the first time and slept in that. Too bad it rained the entire night….luckily our tent did prove to be nice and water proof. While we were in Mission Beach we also cracked open our first coconut and ate it for dinner along with some strongbow, Malibu and grapes. They had a really nice beach there as well, but the entire way down the coast we were unable to swim because of crocs and stingers…up until a town of MacKay. We stopped in Townsville which was terrible, we made dinner on a concrete parking lot at a truckstop. We stopped at Bundaberg and had a tour of their rum distillery and then we got to one of our favorite places – Airle Beach.

It’s a pretty small town with not a whole lot to do but such a nice laid back vibe. We checked into our first caravan park and decided to stay for 3 days. This was a really nice place. The people were nice, the camp kitchen was right near our site, and it was really clean. After three nights we decided we would stay in Airlie for a bit longer because we still hadn’t gone snorkeling or to Whitehaven beach. So we booked 2 nights at a smaller, less desirable place. And then someone followed us…like full on pulling over and trying to be all sneaky following us. We did successfully manage to lose him but where we were staying was a little sketch so we both decided we would be more comfortable at the original place. So we both gave up 10$ and went back to the first place where we felt much much better and safer. We weren’t shoved in a dark corner of the park.

We spent the rest of our time at the caravan park and while we were in Airlie we did go on a really awesome snorkeling trip on the boat called Camira. We got to see a whole bunch of the islands including one that looks like a monkey’s face and Hamilton Island , Whitehaven Beach which was amazing, unreal, can not even begin to explain it. We also got a chance to go snorkeling on the great barrier reef and Mandy’s lips got so burnt the swelled up to twice the size. Fantastic. All in all it was a really amazing day and definitely one of the highlights for both of us on the trip.