Hello family and friends!

It's Steph writing this time :) As Rach mentioned in her last entry, she is home in Seattle for her sister's wedding and I am hangin' here solo in beautiful Sydney. It's been a gorgeous day here (again!) and I've been out and about most of the day. Right now I am sitting in an internet cafe not too far from the apartment I've sublet in Potts Point, a little area about 15 minutes walking distance from downtown Sydney. I am settling in just fine here on my own and keeping quite busy. I've already found a gym to join, gotten to know the local coffee barista and a few of the store owners, and have done some exploring and shopping. Over the next couple of weeks I'll continue to get aquainted with wonderful Sydney, hang out with some of the local friends we've made here, and enjoy some down time...hopefully at the beach. Fun! I can't wait for Rach to get back though so that we can continue our adventures. We have tons more in Australia to do and see! Plus, I miss her :) After she returns we will head back up the east coast to continue where we left off....good segment for me to start filling you all in on what we did after flying in to Brisbane....

So, we flew in to Brisbane from Sydney and picked up our rental car, which Rach deserves some kudos for.... We rented a Toyota Corolla and expected an upgrade b/c she is a Hertz Gold member....we just didn't expect the upgrade we ended up getting! As we wheeled our cart of luggage over to spot 27 on the Hertz lot, we noticed that our car was the most ugly "I'm a tourist" blue we'd ever seen. Clearly this was not going to be acceptable b/c we were going to have the car for so long. So, Rach went in and jokingly said to the girl (who she'd befriended while signing paperwork, etc.) that we just can't drive around in the tourist-mobile for 2 weeks and asked if they had anything else. They didn't. However, since the girl liked Rach so much, she upgraded us to a totally phat Nissan Maxima with leather seats and all the bells and whistles (many steps up from the Corolla!!). Huge score! Guess how hot we looked rolling around? Pretty good if I do say so myself :) Anyway, so after we picked up the car we had to decide where we wanted to go.....yes, we were winging it again! We decided to head south b/c we knew Byron Bay was one stop we definitely wanted to make, as it had been highly recommended many times. We thought we'd check out one or two places on the way just to see if anything else tickled our fancy. We passed by Surfers Paradise, as we'd heard from quite a few people that it probably wouldn't really be our scene (a bit young and roudy) and ended up stopping by Palm Beach, another beach town along the way. It was quite a let down - strip malls, no personality, and a little dub-T. So we continued on to Byron Bay. Boy oh boy are we glad we did and didn't waste any time anywhere else.

Byron Bay is an amazing place!!!! As soon as we pulled in to town we knew were going to like it and that we wanted to stay a while. There was this awesome energy pouring out from everywhere. There were tons of young people (but not too young!) and the town itself was adorable too. Both of us looked at each other and said, yep, this is it! So, we went to the tourist agency to find accomodation and settled on a little apartment just outside of town. The rest is history after that.

We ended up spending the next 6 nights in Byron Bay at "Laila's Apartment". Laila, the woman who owns the house where the apartment is, was wonderful to us. The apartment itself was simple yet adorable, decorated with lots of bright colors and cool paintings. Laila is a painter and all of the work in the apartment is hers. Very cool! We even had our own outdoor shower (and an indoor one too) and a nice little back yard all to ourselves. The location couldn't have been better either - we were right on the beach (literally 50 yards away) and only a 20 minute walk in to town. Does it get any better??...yes...Bryon has the most stunning beaches we've ever seen! Aside from Croatia, we agreed that we haven't seen prettier water. It's crystal clear, really clean and, depending on the tide and time of day, has varying colors of blue and turquoise. The beaches are amazing too - they're longer, cleaner, and whiter than any we've seen. And at low tide the beach totally changes - it gets much longer and the b/c the water goes waaay out, little pools, which get really warm in the sun, get created. One afternoon we took a long walk and ended up sitting down for a few minutes in the shallow water. We just sat there and took it all in. It was awesome. Both of us said again to each other how lucky we were to be in Byron and on this trip. We both used the term "magical" to describe Byron quite a few times. It truly is.

Over the next seven days and six nights we explored, shopped, layed on the beach, met some new friends, and just had a blast. I ran on the beach in the mornings, Rach ran some evenings. We took long beach walks every day and Rach took a surf lesson (the pics are up). We cooked in for a lot of our meals (a nice change from eating out so much!), managed to have sushi about 5 times, and went out to a few fun dinners in town too.

All in all it was an awesome 6 days and both of us would highly recommend Byron to anyone! It's truly a magical place!!

Ok, time for me to sign off. I'll be back soon to write about our next adventures in Noosa and Fraser Island!

Until next time :)

xoxo,
Steph