30th April Phillip Island

We had a pretty bad nights sleep at our couch surf in Melbourne with a slanted futon mattress meaning we were both on slants all night! This was less than desirable but we were so tired it seemed to do the trick. We had no bread for breakfast so headed out nice an early. In the rain. This was the start of a great day! (Feeling slightly reminiscent of new york here?)
We set off and stopped for petrol which ended up being a stop for breakfast. The golden arches bought us in for sausage and egg mcmuffins & hash browns of course!!

After this slight detour we carried on our 80k journey to Phillip Island. Laura spotted a westpac and we made another little detour to transfer some good old english money into our ozzie accounts for our special treat on Thursday! (More about that later!) Finally we arrived at the Island and our luck was in the clouds had started to break! With that we popped into the tourist information center picked a few bits up and were on our way! First stop on Lauras agenda was a chocolate factory! 

Chocolate Penguins

Tuesday 29th Drive to Melbourne!

Another blog already you may be thinking? Well you lucky folks get more to read this week! 

An eager start for us today up and out by 8:30 ready to go! We are staying with a couple from Melbourne in Noble Park who we are looking forward to meeting!

Our satnav said we would make beautiful time arriving at 3:45. We knew this wouldn't be the case but it's nice to know it's possible! We planned to do a few stops just to swap driving between us as it is such a long way. To give you an idea it's the same distance between home and Brisbane to home and Melbourne! It took us how many weeks to do that? The difference here is it's not the east coast and there isn't a lot in-between! Nothing but farms and fishing villages really. Because of this we have opted for the highway route. We followed the same route we took to Canberra except this time we stayed on the same road. After this point this is what our satnav said..

Monday 28th April!

Hello everybody we are still here! A little news update..

Last Thursday Deb and Ian left for Japan, South Korea and China until the 11th of May where we will meet them at Ayres Rock. We are left in charge of the garden, fish and the house in this period. During the last week we have had a bit of a relax due to another long weekend for us for Anzac Day. Anzac Day is like remembrance day for Aussies. We had a weekend full of fixing proton rally cars and renault clios.

Easter Sunday 20th April

Happy Easter everybody!
We have had a busy 4 day bank holiday weekend so far,
Good friday was spent working for us Myles with Ian cutting up steel and Laura doing accounting work and learning more about website building.
After this was dinner and being good Friday no meat was allowed so it was a fish dinner!

Saturday another great day, Laura spent the day with Deb & her mother at the Sydney Easter Show.
Its a huge show with a funfair, showbag hall [ a huge room full of promotional bags?!] animals shows and general allsorts! It was great fun! I saw lots of ducks and chooks (chickens to you English folk) but no big hanging meat car uses because that upsets the modern day Aussies (wimps) for an agriculture show I thought that was a bit sad. But otherwise it was HUGE and very good fun. 

General update/ we are still alive post - Tuesday 8th April

Today is a work day. As we haven't spilled the beans on work of late we thought we should give you a little update. 

We are working for Think Software. We are learning how Ian's buisness and software works and what it is capable of.

To start with Ian wanted to see more of Laura's creative side so we were set the task of making a cartoon advertisement & demo for the website.

This is all fine and dandy very cute etc. This went down so well with clients we made a second for a new business venture to do with car parts:

Again same format seems to be going great. 

So onto bigger stuff! 

Myles is in charge of photographing one of Australia's biggest nurseries & biggest rose developer, Swanes. 

Aren't these guys beautiful? Wish we could bring some home they are just phenomenal in size, colour and smell!

This is an ongoing process alongside with making Ian's other website beautiful ready for release. Laura got as far as her knowledge would take her and realised the need to know HTML and CSS were upon her. 10 minutes finding an app and she was off. Aaron Ian's son and programmer set us up and we were off! So far Laura knows the basics of HTML and can read some code! This is all good progress but will be and is a steep learning curve! Here's what today's screen looked like:

With this will hopefully bring new change to the blog or a new blog entirely! So that's pretty exciting..

So that's us at the moment! 

We haven't heard from any of you except Kate Grandma and Mark so we assume you are all dead. Therefore no comments no need to write blogs! We feel like we are talking to ourselves a little! It would be great to figure out who is still reading! 

Update 2, over Easter we will be heading to Melbourne finally! This may be by plane, car, motorbike or train! We haven't decided yet and will let you know! 

Lots of love xxx

Australian Statistics

Hello all. If like me you like to know numbers we have spent a few minutes working some out for you. We have now been in Australia 8 months so what does that mean exactly? These numbers are for Australia only..

How long have we been in Australia?

8 months

Or 

34 weeks

Or

244 days

Or

5856 hours

Or

351,360 minutes

Or

21,081,600 seconds

How many meals have we had?
732 (on the assumption we had breakfast lunch and dinner every day) 

How far have we travelled?

12,516km (7,822miles) - in our car only, that excludes the long haul trips in 'borrowed cars'

What did that cost us in petrol?

$1431 

Friday 28th March

So an end of the week update for you all. Were at Deb and Ian's until we go to Ayres Rock (Uluru) for Laura's 21st. 

In between that we will go to Melbourne but until then we will be doing the usual working and chilling out. 

This week we have started working with Ian on his website. We are now video editors & animation people.

{Whilst I was writing this blog our videos have gone live!

They don't work on Apple devices due to flash player so look on your computers & have the sound up!}

http://www.thinksoftware.net.au

So anyways that's been us for the past week just working away. 

So that's today's excitement with the demo of Ian's software and our animation going live.

Have a lovely Friday because it's the weekend tomorrow!! (& we are going to Costco!)

22nd March Port Stephens

For once in a very long time we awoke to a day where we hadn't had rain overnight! 
You would think this meant a dry tent but sadly not dew had its way with the tent! Oh well. We had breakfast of cheese toasties from our leftover cheese from burgers the night before. This was a good start to the day and motivated us to get the tent down quickly and get a move on to Port Stephens. It was a long drive for Myles with not a lot of excitement in between but as ever we kept ourselves entertained starting to remember and recognise where we were. We had planned to stay in a hostel recomended to us by Georgia and arrived to find that it was fully booked out even though it wasn't online.. More than frustrating we grabbed our camps book and started to search for somewhere else to search. Laura found somewhere for $25 with a pool so we went for it. Turns out its pretty new and modern which was a lovely change! All booked in & a tent up the next thing on the agenda was lunch and sand boarding. We had more cheese sandwiches whilst Laura found out where the sand dunes were. Anna Bay just down the road was our next destination. When we arrived we were greeted by sand and camels...

20th Grafton

Only a short one today! 

Laura got a haircut. We had a maccas for lunch, then we left. We do not have fond memories of Grafton.

(Myles' blog for the week)

18th/19th Gold Coast & Byron

We are tired today after a 7am start. Myles has a 3 hour drive and we're going paddle boarding. What can go wrong?

Oh and today was raining. 

We started our day pretty chilled using some wifi gutted to see we don't have a couch surf in Byron which means the tent has to come out!! With that we waited for rush hour to end and headed off early. We were in the Gold Coast by 11 with the clouds above us but holding out! We cooked an early noodle lunch before paddle boarding and made a start. We had a briefing before we headed out and that was us! We both got the last 2 boards... PINK! Good thing Myles likes pink...

Monday 17th back to Brisbane!

On the road again..

We spent the morning being a bit lazy in bed with the cat which was nice. After this bags packed and we were off! Sort of.. Laura had seen a very nice dress in a window so we went to check it out. Turned out it was horrible but we found a nicer one. 

This also wasn't bought due to the zip down the front.

Friday 14th, Saturday 15th, Sunday 16th Sunshine Coast

Today was our last day working for the hostel, when we say we I mean Laura was finishing her hours that she hadn't done. This left Myles in bed watching new films & tv shows that terry gave us for our hard drive! It was a pretty easy morning cleaning thankfully! Once this was done back to our room for some chill out time! Myles was watching F1 practice so I had a lay down and watched some girly films we had acquired. This took up most of the afternoon between packing lunch and other things. We headed to play some pool before dinner and got invited to have some leaving drinks with some of the guys we had been working with which was lovely. We ordered our last meal from Wayne the chef who Laura had worked with lots. 

Thursday 13th Update!

Today has been a happy day! Firstly we have the day off from making beds much to Laura's relief..

Secondly this meant a well deserved lie in & long morning shower which is good too!

After this Laura proved that the car has an infestation of ants. Not so good..

This meant a trip to bunnings! (Laura seems to have bunnings syndrome..) 

Ant spray acquired Coles, Aldi and woolworths were all visited to acquire food stuffs for our departure on Saturday! This is another good thing. After all this food shopping Laura went to specsavers and left with yet another set of new glasses as Australia had rusted hers.. (Big up specsavers they do have cracking customer service!) 

Next stop flight centre! 

Don't get too excited only 1 flight booked today and we're off to Ayres Rock for Laura's 21st! Very exciting, but more so because Debra and Ian have also booked their flights to the big rock for Laura's birthday! 

Update 8th March

Yet again our plans have changed with the wind as usual.

So our 6 week stay has turned into a 2 week stay (leaving this Friday/Saturday) We have a drive back to the Sydney region of the world ahead of us. We're going to stop off as we go again picking up some places we missed first time & the few we loved. 

It's all a bit in the air at the moment but could mean possible work whilst were here or in England?! Very exciting times are coming for us! So watch this space over the next few weeks you never know what could happen! 

This is our rough itiniary as it stands thus far! 

Didgeridoos & Didgeridont's

This is a bit of a side post, whilst tidying up our new accommodation Laura found a great book called "Didgeridoos & Didgeridont's "

Sunday 2nd of March

After all of the excitement of Lady Elliot we hit the ground with a bit of a bump!

We have decided to hang around our hostel in Hervey Bay for a while. We aren't sure how long we will be here just yet but could be upto 6 weeks. 

We are working in the hostel doing general stuff like making beds to mowing and today Laura got her first painting job unsurprisingly! 

(Before they were a horrible terracotta brown.)

So in exchange for 4 hours work a day we get a restaurant meal & our accommodation, washing and all things like that! 

So that's us for a while! 

Just a short one to keep you all updated! 

Lots of love to you all xxx

Lady Elliot Island 26th/27th February

Hello all, a big blog for you all to read full of photos and incoming videos on the blog so keep checking back for more!!!

After a night of rain we were up at 6:30 as today we had a very very special trip ahead of us. We put down a very wet tent in record time. We were done and ready to leave our campsite/hostel combo to go to the airport. Today we had a scenic flight to Lady Elliot Island where we would spend 2 days and 1 night. It is an Eco Island Resort on the Great Barrier Reef. To get there we had to take 14 seater light aircraft to the island where we could snorkel the reef to our hearts content! Sounded perfect when we booked it and emptied our bank account!!! We waited nervously in the Airport hoping it would be everything that we expected it would be. We stole some airport wifi and were checked in and on our way! We got the back seats in the plane which we thought was pretty cool because we had so many windows to look out of! 

Fraser Island 25/02

Our trip to Fraser Island.

Today we had a day at Fraser Island booked. The bus was due to arrive at 7:30 and at exactly 7:50 it arrived. We had a short bus journey to the port, which was tiny. It was actually a boat ramp with a carpark. We jumped on the barge and it took us across to Fraser. Fraser Island is the biggest sand island in the world. So now w have been to the biggest and smallest sand island in the world! We were sorted into our groups and we climbed aboard a rather elaborate coach. There was a seat next to the driver an naturally I asked if I could have it. This later turned out to be not such a good idea. After asking a few questions about it and driving for 2 minutes I understood why it looked like it did.

(Man bit coming up) especially for Mark and Lindsay. 

This truck was the same spec as the support trucks used on the Dakar rally.
It had a 6.8L 340hp diesel twin turbo straight 8, however had 1250f/lb of torque. Basically enough to tow the moon. 
It had a 12 speed gearbox with paddles behind the wheel, 8 different diff settings, 4 drive settings 2 reverse drive settings (each with 4 gears). She even had launch control for when its stuck. if you were stupid enough to get it stuck!
It was a 33tonne monster.

Sunshine Coast 22nd

We spent 2 days on the sunhine coast and the weather was awful.. Luckily trip advisor had a solution! Aqua Fun Park!

Essentially it's a bit like total wipeout with a lot more swimming as all of the parts aren't connected! 

As you can see from the photo above we had glorious weather for this occasion. We put our swimmers on paid our fee and qued up until the next session, which  luckily was only 5 minutes! We dipped our toes into the lake and it was surprisingly warm. Most likely because it was cold out! The horn sounded and our safety briefing done we went for it throwing ourselves into the water and on to the first inflatable. We had really good fun but it's surprisingly exhausting pulling yourself onto the inflatables, this meant Myles was often dragging me on by my life jacket! We had a great time & hopefully will have a video sent to us of our time on there as they were filming a promotional video! Along with more close ups on the inflatable itself!

So there you have it, us pommies know how to do it in the rain! 

Lots of love to you all!

Game Day

This is a note from Myles! He received an email with the game day video..

When he told me this I had NO idea what he was on about until I watched it.

This is a link to Game Day 2013! (Make sure your sound is on & loud (from Myles)

http://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=1CI14MDIlMg

(For those who don't know it's Sydney NYE Video from the crews point of view and we're in it!) 

First person to comment where they saw us wins!