I'm sure everyone is waiting in anticipation for me to continue my vacation story!! Yeah, probably not, but I'm going to anyway!

After a 9:30 pm bed time at the Gold Coast, we woke up nice and early to check out. We proceeded to find a $5 breakfast. GC is a lot like Florida...beach, sand, tall ugly skyscrapers obscuring the views, cheap food/souvenirs...there's even a part of it called "Miami". We ate our breakfast at Chickery Chick's, which incidentally is also where we ate breakfast one day with Scott when he was visiting. Then it was off to the beach!!! Even though it's the dead of winter, the water was gorgeous and we both had a lovely swim. We had some time to lounge around but then it was off to the bus station to catch the bus that would take us to Byron Bay!!!

I had never been to Byron Bay before and I will definitely be going there again after the wonderful experience we had! We blindly had booked a place on the internet and it was absolutely gorgeous! Crystal hit the hippie jackpot at an "op shop" (second hand clothes) and also bought me an awesome polka dot scarf. We put together our Byron Bay outfits for the "alternative tour" we were going on the next day. Decided to save money and get stuff for dinner at the grocery store: salad, turkey kebabs, haloumi, and then breakfast food for the next two mornings. We found a steal of a deal at the bottle shop (liquor store) - four 250 ml cans of wine (yes...cans...) for $4.99, and it was actually decent!! Crystal poured hers into a glass...I opted for the classy option of drinking mine straight from the can. Are you cringing?? We headed back and cooked up our meal and had a relaxing evening chatting on the back porch...we made it till 9:15 pm this time...it's kinda like we're two old ladies traveling around and going to bed early!!

SO EXCITED for the next day which was our alternative tour!!! I wasn't quite sure what exactly it was, but it sounded cool and there were all these multi-coloured buses driving around Byron...it just seemed like the thing to do! We were picked up by a rainbow bus blaring tunes with an old hippie by the name of Ivan driving. I would most definitely recommend this tour to...well, I wouldn't recommend it to my parents, or anyone under 18, but it was so much fun! Our first stop was a pub/bottleshop and you were totally allowed to buy alcohol and drink on the bus...we may or may not have done that. Then we went to a super secret swimming hole - a rock pool hidden away in the Whian Whian forest. The next stop was where Crystal and I were christened the BBQ queens!!! We helped Ivan make a huge amount of burgers and snags - of course they weren't served on buns - it's not the Aussie way! They way they do it here is to eat it with the cheapest white bread available. Our final destination on the tour was Nimbin. Nimbin is a very small town of about 350 people, I believe. It just kind of formed itself in 1973 when there was a festival held there and some of the people decided to stay permanently. It was an.....interesting place. Wiki will probably explain it better than me, so here you go:

Nimbin was a sleepy dairy town until 1973, when the Aquarius Festival, a large gathering of university students, practitioners of alternative lifestyles, 'hippies' and party people, was held in the town.^[4] After the festival many participants and festival goers remained in Nimbin to form communes and other multiple occupancy communities. Since the Aquarius Festival, the region has attracted many writers, artists, musicians, actors, environmentalists and permaculture enthusiasts. The most prominent recreational substance of choice in Nimbin is cannabis. Writer Austin Pick described his initial impressions of the town this way: "It is as if a smoky avenue of Amsterdam has been placed in the middle of the mountains behind frontier-style building facades. ... Nimbin is a strange place indeed."<sup>[5]

Definitely the kind of place you go once in a lifetime and it was really cool to have seen it! On the way back to the hotel we were given vouchers for a free entree (in Australia, entree means appetizer) and a $5 meal at one of the hostels in town so we decided that sounded like a good idea. That night, we stayed up till 11:30!!!! Crazy times. We ended the night by frolicking in the ocean with our shoes on...not the best idea, but I think we salvaged them. Our last day in Byron we walked up to the famous lighthouse along an ocean path and up what we agreed was approximately 2 billion and one stairs. That marks the end of the Byron Bay leg of the trip...we got arrived home to Jeremy cooking an amazing roast and I strongly encouraged Crystal to watch The Castle which is one of my favourite movies ever and is so very Australian! We slept in Brisbane for one night and then we were off on our next adventure and the best city in the entire world....MELBOURNE!!!!!</sup>