a rare rush amid a lazy lifestyle

ok so its been a bit, kind of skippin stuff in between as well. right now we're in beautiful byron bay, loving it here despite the dodgy weather, been surfing everyday for that last week and not much better to show for it. when i say dodgy weather, maybe i should say, we'ver been dodging the weather, as couple days ago there was a hailstorm here in byron, apparently it made international news, any this storm came in while we were surfing but the surf was really good that day so a bunch of us tried to get every wave in we could. there was a massive black cloud that was coming, i swear when i was paddling out i thought it was night well into dusk. anyway when it started raining we started coming in, it then turned to little hail and then golf ball hail within seconds, the few of us stranded on the beach bunkered down with our surboards for cover, looked like a scene out of a war movie. couple bruises on my arms so not bad though. apparantly the cars in town were getting hammered, a few taped up windows today and a ton of insurance claims on the way. pretty cool in hindsight to be a part of. othere than that we've been dining off really cheap meals provided by one of the local bars here, of course they're trying to get us to stay and party, works some of the time. either that or we've been bbq'n at another hostel with some friends we've made along our travels. went to church again today at the local presbyterian church, hung out with the pastors family last week and today went to the beach with a couple of them and the travelling freinds we've made. crap surf today but that's ok, in case you're wondering why i'm rushing this it's cuz i'm logging off in the next minutes as i don't want to have my time role over into the next 15 mintue block, besides its quarter after seven and i'm starving, gonna make our first meal in like a week. more to come, enjoy.

your exclusive viewing session.

ok so there are still a few of you...and what is this about the brighton independent doing articles on the lost australian brethren? sounds like a sequel series to the hardy boys if you ask me. cool. glad i made the paper on both sides of the country. i tell yah my PR ratings must be through the roof. did you know aussies would never say "put another shrimp on the barbie"? yah i know, my whole vision was shattered too. unfortunately its not being replaced by anything else as i really haven't met too many australians yet. i lie though as in fact the other day in surfer's paradise we met the most australian australian i think you can find. i'll try to get a pic up before my time runs out. you blog readers should feel priveleged as these photos are first releases...before facebook even. just part of your VIP access package. i haven't figured out the rest of the package yet. enjoy!

white water world. the day darcy was sick. this here be the tornado, a swashbuckling adventure of epic proportions, although i admit at first i thought it would actually fling us all the way around, then i thought about it and how that would not make sense. look around and you can see some of the other rides we went on.

one of the rides in whitewater world, good one for racing.i'm third from the right

the group of freinds i went to whitewater world with the day darcy was sick.

PUD, as in Pudding, our roommate for one night. of course that's his nickname but we never got his real name. this guy is the most australian dude we've met. he told us stories for like 3 hours, which were hard to understand cuz of his slang and accent but we got em. he also showed us how to wax our surfboards properly. pretty cool guy.

in the black slide in Wetnwild (for a macro view see next pic) the slide was not completely dark though so we tried to just close our eyes to make it real. this photo is a result of that attempt...i had to open them a sec to take the picture.

this is the WetnWild water park, the slide in the foreground (ie the one we're about to go down) is the one that made our backs look like we had wounds where our wings once were attached.(hypothetical of course, we are angels but we're conservative)

darcy and i starting off our pub crawl. this is a club with a bowling alley in it. i felt bad for the lanes cuz they got hammered by bowling balls held by people likewise hammered. i got a strike...no big deal.

this is later on in the pub crawl. the asian looking one in the middle is one of the vancouverites (go figure) who we met in noosa and watched the hockey game with.

do you really read this?

hey everyone, who ever that is, i have this weird hunch that there are only like 2 or three ppl who read this thing anymore but w/e, i've started it, so i'll finish it. as you are aware i don't update this very often and that i assure you is cuz it takes forever and we have the opposite of forever for computer time, no because we don't care about all you invisible readers out there, the government probably has some one reading this, just to get information for whatever it is they need info for...and NASA too. anyway i have no idea what i wrote about before and i don't want to go back and read it. as of the last few days we've been hangin out in surfer's paradise doing, you guessed it, no surfing at all. the weather has been crap for the last week so we really haven't been out much. what we did do is go to some theme parks around the area. don't worry, they were ridiculously expensive so we're stickin to our guns on our budget out the door theory. darcy has been sick lately so he missed out on one of the parks. that day i went to white water world with some of the freinds we met in noosa. the ones with whom we watched a canucks game live online. was awesome and we even got through to dreamworld (the other park by the same company) for free and went on one of the rides, we then left to grab our shirts and tried to get back in, but this time they stopped us. I'm not sure whether i should have mad that we could've just stayed and went on all the other rides, or glad that we got through once and did a ride for free. hmmm, i'll get back to you...no i won't but w/e. the other two days darcy and i went to another set of water and ride parks, Wet n' Wild and Movieworld. Movie world had a couple sweet rides and wet n wild was good too but the slides were harsh on our backs. terrible construction. today we're wating for the bus to take us to byron bay where i think we will most likely have to get jobs to help us pay for our spending habits. darcy and i have been reading a lot lately too as it is cheaper than drinking and that can only be done so many times a week ;) right now i am reading 'The Age of Turbulence' by Alan Greespan, so far a good read.
So maroochydore was one of the worst parts of the last week and a half that have been kind of slow, disjointed and dull at times (besides the theme parks of course), in part i think due to the weather. anyway the YHA there was a terrible hostel with a really weird asshole of a manager (i would say it differently but i don't know what else would describe him)the hostel was in the middle of nowhere in a residential area and the free shuttle into town was unrliable, on the way back the manager forgot to pick us up so we waited at the pickup zone for an hour. good show. while there we checked out the underwater world, an aquarium you walk under in a glass tunnel. then we just chilled with a coffee and read some local papers. the next day we left, a day ahead of schedule as we didn't want to be there anymore, although the other hostellers there were pretty good and we went out that night which was a good time. couldn't take our surfboards to maroochydore cuz the bus driver wouldn't let us (this was a local transit system), didn't matter though as the weather was too cold anyway. k sorry for all the bad news, i really can't complain about travelling australia, we are still having fun, just a bit of a lull lately, that's all. even darcy was bored the other day. as mentioned i'm getting into reading which is helping a lot to get through it. surfer's paradise has also been eye candy for me in that i love looking at all the high rises, how impressive they are and how each one tries so hard to be unique. the V8 supercar indy is getting ready to start so all the streets are lined with cement barriers and grandstands, pretty cool, wish i could be here for that. anyway i have like 2 minutes left so i'm gonna wrap it up...if you really want more just email me and i'll tell you what you need to know. cheers.

moving away from home

hey people, well today darcy and i have decided to leave our lovely home of noosa, we're off to the tiny town of maroochadyre (or something like that) for a couple days, mostly because i was reading about the area on one of the nights when i was clinically insane bored. i found this place and found a couple things we could do down there, namely a couple museums that darcy may be interested in, and a tunnel aquarium where we'll get to see all the fish we didn't get to while diving. also we'll check out the surfing scene down there. on that note there's an update on our board situation...amazingly, on the way home after my last post, with one surf board in hand, i decided to drop in this one little surf shop that we had been in earlier but hadn't found anything, anyway i saw another board, same brand and look as the one we had, jus a little shorter, which was exactly what we wanted. so i did a little bartering and for another $460 we came out with our second board of the day!!! all in all it was a $1000+ day with hostels, food, etc. so yah we're doing well sticking to our $65/day budget. unfortunately we still have to come back for the board bag though so we might be back in noosa later. the receptionists at our hostel here know us by name now so when we checked out this morning they were all surprised that we were leaving. earlier this week i forgot my key in my room and i told the receptionist and she didn't bat an eye or ask a question before giving me another key for the room. she knew my name and my room number already. anyway yah so now we're leaving our celebrity status, although when we said we were going to maroochadyre they said we'd be back cuz "its shit there" lol. so we'll see. k welli was going to upload some pictures but its not working right now, perhaps cuz i'm loading them all onto facebook. so if you can check em out there otherwise i'll try again later. oh dad i just bought John Grisham's 'the broker' to help pass time when i have nothing to do. i know you own it so i couldn't stand that i was buying it again but oh well, done the first 5 chapters already. Oh and to all people out there, never, ever watch "the duchess" worst movie ever. enjoy

its job huntin season shortly.

k guys, i realize i have only done one picture post but lately we haven't been taking any pics as we're really not doing anything worth taking pictures of. our routine seems to be that we promise ourselves we're gettin up early then actually get up around 10am, from there we have our awesome breakfast of pb and choco spread on toast, from there we borrow one of the surf boards from the hostel...that's right they're free for those who are staying in the hostel, so that's been saving us like $30 a day. that's probably the main reason we haven't moved. its such a good deal. we are trying to wean ourselves though and will likely move on by the end of this week lol. part of that process is finding surf boards for ourselves...which we've partially completed, just this morning darcy and i are are the proud owners of our first 8'1 mini mau surfbaord. $470 later. pretty good price though we figure as it is including a brand new board bag and leash. the guy who sold it to us was really cool. anyway after surfing in the mornings we usually go for a 15 minute walk up to sunshine beach road which has some cheaper alternatives to the ritzy hastings street our hostel is close to. here we get free internet again...woot. and reasonably priced groceries. after that its usually some down time and then supper making time, which can take up to 2 hours including shopping, cooking and eating. after that...i'm bored out of my freaking mind. unless i want to go out to a club there is nothing to do here. and i would do that but it's way to expensive, so i sit in my room and listen to music, sooooo boring. now you say why not hang out with all the people i know from the way? unfortunatley we've lost them all as we've decided to hang out in noosa for so long and no one else is really that into surfing compared to us. there's a couple people we know but it's hard to connect with different locations and schedules. that's why i think if i stay here for any length of time i'm going to need to find a night time job so i don't go insane. darcy can just chill out doing nothing at night sometime but i cannot handle it. speaking of work, its definitely a must at this point so we are going to have to decide when and where we want to sit put for a few weeks. also whether we want to do harvesting work or local work (ie hostels, restaurants) so yah its gonna happen. yesterday we met a pretty cute couple who are from taiwan and go travelling for one month every year. the husband is looking at retiring soon as he loves to travel so much, they were giving us advice on how to cook our rice and even insisted on me sharing a beer with them! i can't pass up free beer. darcy could though :( our hostel is pretty good but i think it is missing the traveller's vibe as it is more of cheap accomodation than a hostel. that's why i think i'm not meeting people either as it seems to be less communal and more resortty (as odd as it sounds for a hostel) we tried to find a church to go to on sunday but after looking through yellow pages, internet sources, newspapers, asking locals and phoning churches, i could not find anything, i know they're out there but i wanted to know where i was going so we didn't end up at some spiritualist assembly of scientism church...no joke, they're around here. anyway as for our plans for the next while, we really don't know, it kind of slowly gets formulated through talking about it like every hour. we'll see what happens enjoy for now.