I have found my new love.

Sailing.

Last week Dan and I spent 3 days and 3 nights on a boat sailing the Whitsunday Islands.  It was actually the most amazing few days ever.  We were on this boat with 14 other passengers and 4 crew.  We all slept in bunks below the deck, but our bunk was just under a large hatch in the deck.  The hatch was maybe 3 feet by 4 feet and we left it open at night so it was basically like sleeping on the boat deck under the stars.  It was so amazing.  The whole 3 days were spent snorkeling, sailing and wandering around on whichever island the skipper decided to go to. 

The snorkeling was so amazing.  I was a bit of a baby because the water was cold so I whinged a bit about it, but I always got in.  We saw tons of fish, a sea turtle, some jelly fish.  Dan even saw a sting ray.  We saw these blue crabs that seemed to be trapped in small pools when the tides went out.  There were so many of them that when they all moved together it actually looked like the ground was moving. We saw some snakes as well when we were walking on one of the islands.  Luckily Dan spotted them because I definitely wouldn’t have seen them.  That island that we were on had beaches that were made of silicon.  It had something to do with the ocean being really deep there and the silicon comes out of the ground.  It was really great for exfoliating!  It also made the sea water taste weird. 

The trip was a bit gross though because we were on a boat and there aren’t showers, we went from Friday morning until Monday night when we got back to Adelaide.  By that point Dan and I had salt permanently imbedded in our skin.  Dan’s hair could basically be molded into any shape and mine only moved in sheets!  Needless to say, showering was the first thing we did when we got back. 

 

When Dan first got here we stayed in Adelaide for a few days.  I tried to take him up to the Conservation Park that’s near Adelaide.  Somehow our timing was message up and we couldn’t catch a connecting bus and ended up walking for ages down a road and when we finally got there we only had barely an hour before the bus home left and we had to catch it because there was no way we were walking the whole back again. 

That night I took Dan out and I made him try a food that’s famous here in Adelaide.  We had whats called an AB.  Its just chips with gyro meat, tomato sauce, that white sauce that goes on gyros, and some other sauces on top.  It’s something that most people tend to only eat in the middle of the night on the way home from the pubs.  At that point it tastes really good, but most people don’t eat it any other time. 

We also went on a wine tour that weekend, which was fun.  There were a bunch of young people on the tour which was good.  There was a group of Canadians though that were so obnoxious that I couldn’t stand them and by the end of the day I’m fairly sure they knew I didn’t like them. 

 Before we went out to the Whitsundays, we spent a few days in the Gold Coast staying in Surfers Paradise.  We were meant to go surfing while we were there, but there had been some really bad storms the week before which had torn up the beaches and left heaps of debris in the water.  The storms had only been a few days before us so it was still pretty windy which made it hard to lay at the beach because we froze. 

The one day we decided to rent a car and just drive the entire Gold Coast.  We went Zorbing.  It is definitely the most random thing I have ever done in my life.  We got put inside this giant hamster ball thing, but there was one inside another.  There was a smaller one suspended inside a larger one, but the small one was big enough to fit Dan and I when we were sitting down.  After Dan and I climbed in, they fill the small ball up with a few inches of water and pushed us down a hill.  We basically just tumbled and rolled around uncontrollably for the minute or so that it took us to get down the hill.  It was so much fun!  A bit crazy, a bit of a waste of money for the 1 minute it took to get down the hill, but it was really funny! 

We then drove down to these rock pools where we had lunch.  It was just a river that because of the placement of the rocks created natural pools with a little waterfall.  We stayed there for a while even though the water was icy cold.  Dan got in a few times, but I couldn’t.  I jumped in a few times off the rocks, but it was so cold I couldn’t stand it!

After a while we drove back up and went to a beach for a while.  It was a beach for surfing so there was just heaps of surfers everywhere and we were a little bit jealous, but we did some swimming in one of the channels and tried building a sand castle!  We also discovered the sand crabs that were really tiny and white.  They would dig little holes in the sand and the sand that come out of the holes was in perfect little balls.  It was really weird, but not as weird as the ones we saw in the Whitsundays.

The whole trip was so amazing.  We probably could have planned things a bit better.  We ran into a few problems, had a some close calls at missing flights or trains.  Amazingly, it all worked somehow.