Salisbury Lodge

... get up at an ungodly hour of 4 or 5 in the morning to leave Adelaide around 6 and get back around 10 at night! Now why would I want to do that to myself? Whereas for the wine tour we were being picked up around 8:45 in the city, as you can see the battle between Wine or Island was getting tougher for me and Wine tour was winning by thousands of points! And I still managed to get back at 5 in the afternoon just in time to buy some ingredients from the supermarket ...

... right now. Being the Kodak moment group that we are we decided to jump the fence so we could go right up to the waterfall and play in the water. The waterfall was on a cliff and you could look straight down over the edge...quite scary! This is probably why they make you stay on the OTHER side of the fence! We then basically just hiked around and followed the different trails. There was a section with a whole bunch of old mining equipment around it, which was pretty cool to ...

... given a crash course in kayaking which was basically "this is a paddle, this is a kayak" then told to go in the log cabin for our dinner. Dinner was fab, they had a big wood stove, pizza bases and toppings all laid out, it was $10 for as much as you can eat. Grab a base make a pizza and stick it in the oven and keep going until you can't eat anymore. Fab! We ate our fill washed down with some form of punch the manager had made with left over wine, spirits and fruit juice ...

Xmas day in Melbourne - didnt do much! it rained all day which depressed everyone and the atmosphere went down so just stayed in room til afternoon feeling sorry for myself and my knee/s! Spoke to the family and sent the appropriate texts. That evening we all cooked the food we were meant to have on the bbq on the grill and frying pan in the hostel, neil got me a penguin trip for xmas which i couldnt go on ...

First stop was the Hunter valley where we tasted award winning wines and had a lunch that left us with that "full of cheese" feeling! We hired a tandem to get around which was good fun. It was pretty hilly there tho so we weren't too disapointed when we got a pucture on the way home and they had to come out to get us.

A lot of you wont be surprised that we didn't last long in the tent/hut thing (well I didn't - Matt was fine!), we only spent 2 nights there and I had to move to a normal room! It was so small, dark and where it had rained it was damp, so we moved to a normal room with a fan and a fridge! The sunrise over Cape Byron was lovely, a bit cold but nice! Since then we haven't really done much as trying to save our money for Sydney, we are staying in a hotel so they wont have a kitchen so we ...

back to normal life after spending two days and a half with Isabelle my friend from France who is working in a BUsh Camp five hours by bus from Sydney. To give you a better idea of what it was exactly, you have to imagine a summer camp for kids but in the middle of the forests with animals everywhere during the night and lots of mosquitos. Isa is working in the morning which means that she can ...

... a racist ****er! We drove for 3 hours through far too many towns with English names! (Although we did see Swansea and Cardiff which gave me a warm feeling inside - oo-er missus!) Stopped in Gloucester for Food and Goon! Arrived in Barrington Tops which was proper random - high mountain peaks and sub-tropical rainforest. But as soon as you get over that its a wicked place! All manner of activities such as Night Kayaking ...

Australians are weird. I could write an entire entry about their language habits. Anyway, one of the things is that they will name a place something with two words, Port Macquarie, Surfers Paradise, Coffs Harbour. And then they will just call it by the first word. Coffs, Surfers, Port. Port?! Anyway, you might have also noticed that there is no apostrophe is any of the names. This is not a typo. They seem to have dropped apostrophes altogether, so that ...

Our second attempt at acquiring surf lessons was a little more discouraging than the first. We arrived at 9am, looked around for the surf coach, who arrived around 10 minutes after with several large containers and a sign that he stuck into the grassy knoll. He barely gave us a glance. We then realized that there were several other tweenies and lawn gnome-sized children waiting for him. The lesson turned out to be about twenty people ...