Hi everyone!

Wow! Can't believe it's only three days til xmas!!! Hope everyone's ready for it!

We arrived in Surfers Paradise on Wednesday, the bus from brisbane only took an hour so that was one of our better journeys!!! At the transit centre we had half an hour to spare before the hostel bus would pick us up. So I dashed to the supermarket to stock up on some essentials - food!!! Our hostel seemed to be a bit out of the way of town but they did provide regular pickup's and dropoff's into town which was good. The rest of the day we caught up on some zzzz's and lazed around the hostel as they have a big t.v and comfy chairs, all we needed was some popcorn!

The next day we noticed that the funny smell in our room had become stronger, it smelt like something had died and was rotting but after a good search of the room we couldn't find the offending item that was giving off the smell. We complained at reception and all they said they could do was spray soemthing to mask the smell as they had no other rooms to put us in. So to avoid our room we headed into town for the afternoon where we grabbed some lunch and then headed down to the beach to watch some people having a surfing lesson. Then on the way back we had a look in the millions of surfing shops (you can see why it's called surfers paradise!) decided we couldn't afford anything and headed home for some comfort food - bangers and mash!!! Awesome!

After watching the people learn to surf yesterday we thought we'd hire some boards and brush up on our surfing skills from last year. The beach was just across the road from our hostel and hiring the boards was cheaper here than in town. So we grabbed two boards and a couple of rash vests and ventured into the water. At the beginning it was low tide, so the the waves were 'messy' so we were finding it hard to catch a good wave in to actually stand on the board. Gavin and I even got wiped out wading out to the waves and I got smacked in the face by my board and it bloody well hurt!!! But as the tide came in the waves got better and Gavin was soon showing off as he got wave after wave. I managed to get up a couple of times, but after two hours of battling against the waves you get very tired and you need a lot of upper body strength to push yourself up off the board. So after 3 hours we called it a day and headed back to the hostel for a shower and to chill out for the rest of the day.

Today we are off down to Byron Bay for 1 night, then to Sydney for xmas and new year.

Wishing you all a merry xmas peeps!

Lots of love

Helen and Gavin x