Happy New Year and How We Spent Our Summer Vacation Part I.

Welcome to 2010.

Leah and I rang in the new year by waking up at 3:30am and climbing a mountain, but that's getting ahead of the story.

We Started our week on Boxing Day by heading down to Mt. Warning National Park in New South Wales. It's just over the border and about 1.5 hrs from home. We packed up the Rav 4 and Leah jumped behind the wheel. Driving on the left is not as strange as it sounds. We got the hang of it pretty quickly with a few exceptions. The wipers and turn signals are on opposite sides of the wheel, so we had the cleanest windscreen in Australia most of the week. Just about every time we went to make a turn we turned on the wipers instead. You don't realize just how unconscious most of driving is until you switch up the basics. We also are having a hard time adjusting to the rear view mirror being on the left of the driver. And backing up can be a bit hairy. Other than that we're pro.

We had taken our time getting ready and left Brissie about 1:00pm. The drive down to the park was pretty easy, though we did make a wrong turn and went about 30k out of our way. We found a campground on the road leading up to the park and got ourselves a tent site.  The camp ground (Mt. Warning Holiday Park) was packed with people.  We soon found out that this would be a theme of our trip.  We set up the tent and planned to hike the mountain first thing in the morning.  Sunrise is about 5:45 am and since NSW is an hour ahead of Queensland that meant we'd have to get up around 2:30 Brissie time to make the summit by the crack of dawn.  Not gonna happen at that point.

Once we had camp set up we met a couple of travelers who were in the middle of a three month trip around Australia.  Turns out they are Americans and believe it or not they live at 37th and Lipan in Denver.  (That's not far from where we were if you're not familiar)  What a small world this is.  We had fun with them drinking a few beers and enjoying each others accents.  It felt quite homey for the evening.

Around sunset the clouds rolled in and it started raining.  At the time we didn't think too much of it and went to bed. We got up about six and headed to the trail head to start our hike.  Just as we were about to get out of the car it started raining again only this time with a vengeance.  This was full blown sub-tropical rain forest rain.  We made it about 100 meters up the trail before we were both soaked and decided to call it off.  We were both pretty bummed out.  At that point we only had two solid plans and the hike was one of them.

Since the rain had kept us from heading up the hill we decided to head over to Byron Bay and secure a campsite, on the way out we noticed this sign on a car offering what I'm sure is the best deal on a spray tan in Australia.

We didn't take them up on the offer.

Tomorrow: Byron Bay