We arrived in Sydney pretty early and caught a train out of Sydney Airport to the Blue Mountains to reunite with Denise. We got to Springwood (where Denise and family live), and we found a cafe just across the street from the train station to plant and get a cup of coffee to wait for our appointed meeting time. Bev went to get cough drops at the local mini-mart, and she ran into Denise and Lachy picking up groceries! So, we reunited with Denise and Lachy and j...

So, we left Noosa on a beautiful, sunny morning, and we took off for Melbourne, the second most populous city in Australia. We only had a day in Melbourne, so we made the most of it by walking the city, participating in the city's thriving cafe scene, and having dinner and drinks on Lygon Street, the restaurant hub of the city. Why on Earth did we only have one day in a city we had to fly to? Good question! Well, the weather had been so bad for us on the so...

We arrived in Noosa, and it was raining. Shocker! We are seriously now the official drought-breaking Americans. Where we go, it rains. But, never deterred, we press on. :) We crashed at the party hostel, Koalas, and we ended up with an entire dorm room to ourselves. The best thing was it had its own bathroom, so we had a private bath for the first time in a while. Schwing. The next morning, it was, well, raining. But we wanted to surf, and you get wet...

We took another Greyhound from Mission Beach to Airlie Beach. We wanted to go sailing, and the Whitsunday Islands off of Airlie is the place to do it. We landed in town, explored, and lined up a 4-day 3-night sailing trip. Our boat, Spank Me (no that isn't a request...it is the actual name of the boat), could hold up to 28 people, and we had 22. It is a racing boat that won a presitgious race from Hobart, Tasmania to Sydney in the late 1990's. It is a no-frills ...

I was still stick in Cairns, so we couldn't dive the Great Barrier Reef for now. The town of Cairns itself is in the off-season, and combining that with the on and off torrential rains, we decided to try our luck further south. After only a day in Cairns, we grabbed a bus out of town to a place a few hours south called Mission Beach, where we hoped we would still be able to dive the reef. We landed at Scotty's Backpackers, a little family-run place that had a gr...