The Gold Coast

Yes, I'm still alive. For the past 3 weeks we've been traveling, therefore leaving us with no computers or time to blog. (I'll be honest, I already wasn't very good at this whole blogging-on-time thing and this just made it a lot worse) So now that I have some time, hopefully there will be A LOT of blogging being done the next week or two. Sorry for the length.

We started our trip by going up to the Gold Coast in Australia. It's about an hour south of Brisbane and is an hour and a half flight from Sydney. We of course were trying to do everything the cheapest way so we didn't pay the extra money to check in baggage. And we were flying straight from the Gold Coast down to Melbourne (again trying to save money), which is at the bottom of Australia. This meant 2 different climates because the Gold Coast is hot and Melbourne is freezing this time of year! The point of all this is to explain that we fit 10 days worth of clothes for 2 different climates all into our own little backpacks that we could use as our carry-on. So the picture is showing all that 3 girls had for this 10 day trip. Pretty impressive?

On the airplane with our books, ready to go. We're big nerds and always have our books. Okay, so Brighton always has hers, but has never read it since we've been here. She has something against reading right now since that's all Jayne and I do any time we're sitting.
Our first car experience on the wrong side of the road. Jayne drove everytime we had a rental car for the whole 3 weeks. We only almost crashed a few times! Just kidding, it really would be so hard and Jayne did an amazing job at it. She's a natural!
Jayne knows a family in the Gold Coast that we stayed with so we drove right to their house. They're the greatest family ever and have such a nice house. We stayed there for 6 days and loved every second of it. This is Pauline Scallan in the picture with us.
All the theme parks are in the Gold Coast so we decided to go to one on Monday. We went to Warner Brothers Movie World. Loved it! It closed at 5 though (just like everything else does in Australia) so we got there right when it opened and stayed right till it closed. This is Brighton and Jayne posing in front of the Superman ride, which was definitely my favorite.
Is that Batman Jayne's eating lunch with? I think so...
Scared for the Batman ride.
One great thing about the Scallan family is they are obsessed with sports. Their favorite's of course are soccer, cricket, and rugby though, definitely not my most knowledgeable sports. Jayne was sure happy about it when she found out the family plays on an indoor soccer league every Monday night. So of course she played even when we found out she was the only girl for both teams. She did amazing though and even scored! She's our little soccer player :)

This is looking off the patio at the Scallan's home. Yes, that is a river in their backyard. It was so beautiful I could sit there and stare at it all day.

We had planned to take the boat (in their backyard) out one night and it ended up raining just at that time so they put the cover on it and we still went. We stayed completely dry and had a fun ride looking at all the million dollar homes surrounding us while eating biscuits and wine (water for us 3 of course)!

We made dinner and dessert for them on Tuesday night since they were feeding us so much. Our broccoli, chicken dish with crepes for dessert were a hit, but after the 5 or 6 hours of cooking and cleaning in the kitchen, we were ready to never do it again. It was actully pretty humorous!

This is Jayne in our room at the Scallan home. She's falling through the cracks of life? I'm not sure what that means either so you'll have to ask her. Just thought I'd throw in a few random pictures.

Ssurfers Paradise. This is the beach by their house.

What the IGA? All of you who lived in Strawberry Loop 12 years ago should appreciate this!

Thursday we drove to Byron Bay. No words or picture's can even describe it. We happened to be up on this hill by the lighthouse right at sunset. So pretty.

Byron Bay. We were completely surrounded by water and even saw a few whales out there.

Byron Bay also has the greatest little shopping area where we ate lunch and walked around. This town is full of hippie's, in real life! Peace.

The new Batman movie came out the night before so of course we had to go see it once we got home from Byron Bay. It came out a couple days earlier in Australia so we felt pretty cool, I'm not gonna lie.

Friday, the last day we were there, we spent the day at the beach again and also went to the top of the Q1 building. It's one of the tallest buildings in the world, or something like that. This picture kind of gives you an idea of what the Gold Coast is like. It's just never-ending beaches!