This week was not as action packed as our few weeks previously, as we used our time to recover from the month on the road and begin looking into settling into Cairns. We are hoping to stay up or around here for the next couple of months and ideally find some work, paid or voluntary, to keep us occupied.
We had a couple of days in Port Douglas before we were due to hand our beloved camper van back in Cairns as we wanted to spend some time with Nicola’s cousin and aunt before we arrived in Cairns. To that end we left Mission Beach and headed up to Port Douglas with the intention of stopping at Josephine Falls and Babinda Boulders to break up the drive.
On our way back through Mackay we stopped off at the marina and took a stroll amongst some rather expensive looking yachts before heading to the beach for a bite of lunch out of our camper. We then popped into the local shopping mall for some window shopping and Nicola managed to pick up a cheap ukulele which I’m sure will bring us both hours of listening pleasure.
After our manic week before, we decided to have a couple of days relaxing. Our last day in Hervey bay presented us with a beautiful, sunny day complete with flat sea. We decided to walk down to the beach to a beach hire shop to look at renting a sea kayak for an hour. So I took Nicola out on a Jet Ski! I took her out for a spin first and I had to drive quite fast to drown out the sounds of her complaining/lightly screaming, especially when cornering, before swapping over and her taking us for an a nice afternoon along the beach.
It has been a mega busy week, camper vanning slowly up the Sunshine Coast to Hervey Bay, so this blog is a little longer than usual. It’s been an amazing week and now we’ve finally taken a couple more relaxed days I can catch up! I’ll continue where we left off:
I’ve neglected taking too many photos this week so I will keep it short and sweet! Having only arrived home the day before, on Saturday we headed out of the city a little for an afternoon of Horse Riding that Erin had arranged for us before we left the UK. It was a nice couple of hours riding through the Farmland local to the stables and, aside from our aches and pains from Kayaking in Byron Bay last week, great fun!
Road Trip!
Monday morning we made our way back towards the airport to pick up our Jucy El Cheapo Camper, which we had booked for the week, for a road-trip to the Gold Coast. Albeit very modest and only costing $20 (£10) a day, we were quite impressed with our little van and began to head South towards the Tambourine Mountains.
So we’ve landed!
We are in Australia, a lot of planning and time later and we are finally on Australian soil. We arrived at Brisbane a bit early and were held on the plane as Australian immigration and customs hadn’t even opened yet, a gentle reminder that it was now 5am, we had lost two hours of potential sleep inflight and neither of us had managed an amount of shut eye that would make up function correctly. Luckily though Erin, a friend of Nicola, had offered to pick us up. The half hour we had made up in-flight and the ease of which we grabbed our bags and breezed through immigration and customs, probably due to the fact our flight was the only one to have touched down thus far, meant that we had enough time for a cup of tea and to phone/skype home at one of the airport cafes.