Well our travels around Oz have well and truly begun now as we are now living in our camper!!

We picked the camper up on Friday 19th June, and although it took the sales guy nearly 1.5hrs to fill out all the Queensland vehicle sale papers (no simple V5 document here), and then realizing the battery was dead, we were finally able to get on our way! We'd decided that for our first stop we would go down to the Gold Coast, so we booked ourselves into the Main Beach Tourist Park which was about 20 meters from Main Beach in Surfers Paradise. After a short stop over on the way down to Target and Woolworths to get the essentials, we arrived about 4pm and got ourselves setup on our site. Unfortunately for us the weather on the Gold Coast was having a bit of an off day, so for now and the next 3 days all that was forecast was nothing but torrential rain!!! Typical!

The next 3 days it rained pretty much constantly, only stopping for 20mins or so here and there before hucking it down again! We couldn't get anything dry because as soon as we ventured outside half the pacific ocean decided to come through the door. We then had the delightful experience of waking up at 3am one more to find the window above the bed was leaking so half of the bed was soaked through, which thanks to the constant rain meant it would take 2 days to dry out! Oh yeah, our camper came with all the crockery such as plates, cups etc as you get if you rented it so we decided to spend our first afternoon washing everything. It took us just over an hour to get it all clean but once we got it back to camper Em, bless her, promptly dropped the lot in the camper, smashing everything into a billion pieces all over our pond which was once our floor. Oh well, at least we could go an buy some new plastic ones now! (I wonder if she did it on purpose????) Anyway, by Tuesday morning the rain had stopped and we were able to start drying things out and get chance to get rids of the colds we'd both caught by sleeping in a damp camper since Friday. I swear if it had been much longer we would have started to have moss growing on us!!!!

Anyway, once it was sunny on Tuesday, we were able to venture out in Surfers Paradise. WOW the beach here is amazing and goes on as far as you can see. They don't call it SURFERS Paradise for nothing as well, the size of the waves all along the coast are mind blowing so we were a little worried because we had planned on having surfing lessons, but thanks to all the rain for the last few days we no longer had time to get it in, especially Tuesday PM and all day Wednesday were the only days the sun made an appearance! The rest of Surfers Paradise is really nice, very built up and full of high rises, but still nice. Lots of surf shops full of cool stuff and most importantly they had a Muffin Break so Em could stock up on gluten free muffins daily :)

Best bit for us though, and please don't think we revolve our life round food, but we've managed to have 4 ace BBQ's in a row! The campsite has several free gas BBQ's to use, and the meat over here is so much cheaper than back home that we decided to make the most of it in a clean kitchen area. Proper brits though we were doing it in the pouring rain wearing pack-a-macs and shorts!

On Wednesday afternoon we went to Q-Deck which is the tallest residential tower in Australia, which has an observation deck at the top. Its 322m high so we got some great 360o (slightly cloudy) views of the Gold Coast which was really good to see, even though Andy had an attack of vertigo (again!) and cowered in the middle while Em pushed her face as hard as she could against the glass!!!

On our last day we walked up "The Spit" which is an area of protected land just north of Surfers Paradise. On the way we went past the Versace Resort which is where all the celebs stay when getting ready to film "I'm a Celebrity". But the coolest thing was that while we were watching the surfers at The Spit, Em spotted a wild dolphin popping out the waves right in front of us! COOL!!

Tomorrow we're leaving the Gold Coast and heading north to the Sunshine Coast. We're going to spend a few days in Beerwah so we can go to AUSTRAAAAAAALIA ZOO! CRIKEY!!!! Can't wait for that mate! Ripper!