QUEENSLAND, OZ - HOLD ONTO YOUR COFFEE!!!!!!! It’s gonna be a wild ride!

As the ‘3 O’clock coffee hour’ rolled around, Kerri and I grabbed our cuppa jo for the ‘road’ (sand tracks, that is) and so began the laughter! IT WAS HILARIOUS! The ride was so bouncy, that we were using our towels to hang onto the lids of our drinks, and our deep belly laughs weren’t doing much to help! Our vehicle had to make many stream crossings and race to beat the flow of the tide… leaving us beached at our 18-mile mark – bogged down, standing by the dunes at the back of the shore, contemplating how we would handle being stuck here for the night… and 30mins later Mal had us dug out and racing down the final track to catch our barge… just in time for a gorgeous sunset of many bright pinks, oranges and blues… and a long ride ‘home’ (to Noosa) thereafter. I had a surprise though – my friend Lyana (who I met two weeks earlier on my trip to the Blue Mtns) was behind me on the barge! Our two truck loads had to combine into one, so we had nearly 2 hours of talk time to catch up! Gotta love our SMALL world!

A quick shower and Kerri and I ventured into town for dinner… and we ended up being not only invited into a birthday celebration for a random guy at Zachary’s, but his entire group of friends immediately adopted us into the group like we’ve known them for years! It was champagne, gourmet pizza (a New Zealand thang,) and more fun than we could have ever imagined! Once the party dissipated and the bar was closing down, we chatted w/two nice guys from S. Africa and Sydney… who are both originally from the U.K… and as our conversations ran, it was relatively obvious that our brains were in the “how do we go about living here?” mode!