the beginning of our adventure

I'll preface the posts about what we're doing regularly by what we're doing overall. I was going to assume that anyone reading this would already know, but we all know what assuming does.

Mardee has been in Australia since the end of June last year. She spent her first 6 months as an au pair (nanny) and then moved on to other work (Tended bar then worked for the Queensland Government). After her time as an au pair she no longer had access to the Audis she was driving, so bought herself a van with I intentions that she wouldn't convert it to a camper van and I would eventually join her on an adventure. Our currently adventure is loosely structured on driving up the east coast of Australia to Cairns and hitting all the interesting spots along the way. Past that we're looking into a few other things if time and money cooperate (Ayers Rock, originally Thailand, now Bali, perhaps another Australian city for me).

Mard and I began our adventure on Monday the 29th of April. We started by buying groceries and gutting and organizing the van. That first day we drove to and hiked Mount Coolum, then found a a site for that night, watched the sun set, and cooked our first meal. Tuna Stir-fry mmm.

Some of you will be proud to learn that we have actually been keeping notes of our daily activities (as well as mileage and expenditures), so I'll try to highlight the extra interesting things here.

We drove to Sunshine Beach, then on to Noosa Beach and Noosa where we wandered some shops on Hastings Street. I saw my first Kangaroo one morning as we were getting ready for the day, weird creatures they are. We went to the markets in Eumundi where a ton of different vendors and artists set up booths on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

From Eumundi we took a very scenic route in search of the elusive Everglades. The Everglades being so elusive we gave up and went on to Tin Can Bay where a random conversation with two other backpackers in a van led us to find out that we could see dolphins in the morning. That next morning we went down to the harbour early and were able to go down in the water where wild dolphins visited every morning to get some treats and get looked over by the local workers. The dolphins had been visiting for something like 22 years and had quite the relationship with the local staff, they knew to come every morning at 8 am and the staff knew the pod leader and when each on had kids or if any of them ran into trouble.

Dolphins in the wild look much different than ones that do tricks in a pool at Disney World.

Signing off!

- Sabrina, Bina, Wood