Ok so what happened last time I wrote one of these, spending like half an hour doing it, it decided not to save and the whole thing was lost. I was way too angry to write another one any time soon but I have finally recovered from that travesty and am prepared to write another! (fingers crossed it works)

We spent a week on Magnetic Island, as you already know we spent our first few days in a hostel called Base, we then moved onto a different hostel on the other side of the island called Bungalow Bay which was attached to koala sanctuary, Pam was in her element as you can probably imagine! There we did a champagne breakfast where you get this massive fry up, with pancakes, fruit salad, even lamb chops and smoked mackerel!! (and obviously champagne) After that the guides took us on a tour of the sanctuary where we got to hold crocs and lizards and snakes etc. Pam paid to hold a koala yet again and got 2 really nice pictures which you'll all see when we get home.

On our last night we went to a full moon party which was back at Base. We all got dressed up, covered ourselves in glitter dust, which I'd bought with me, and had a few pre-drinks in the room. We then all got a taxi at around 10:15 over to the hostel. We arrived and it was already packed! As you can imagine we all drank quite a lot and pretty much danced all night until arounf 3:30am when we decided it'd probably be sensible to go now since we had to catch the ferry back to Townsville later that morning and be checked out by 10!

(The ferry trip made us all feel a teeeeny tiny bit ill!!)

We then stayed a night in Townsville, it was Fran's last night with us so the 4 of us went to the cinema to watch the new Pirates of the Caribbean film, which if you haven't seen by the way you need to go!

We left for Mission Beach the next day. You could tell we'd arrived because everything here is so much more tropical. Its really hot but there's a lack of sun and an abundance of rain!! Still a really nice place though. As you all probably know this is where we did our skydives and white water rafting.

Our skydive was first! On Tuesday morning we all got up at 6:45am as we were being picked up at 7:30am. However it was pouring down with rain so the jump the beach team came over and said there'll be another 2 hours to wait for the rain to go off. That left us with 2 hours to kill and dwell on the fact that very soon we'd be jumping out of a plane strapped to a strange man with the hope that the parachute will come out! We got picked up and all went to airfield where we signed lots of forms and paid the rest of the amount. We were then put in groups of 5, it was me, Pam, Kat, Vicky and Pip in ours. We were the 2nd group to go up so we sat around dwelling even more! Finally the skydiving men came back for us. We were given a briefing on what to do when you jump and then had harnesses put on. For our dvd we all had a mini interview on how we were feeling etc and then made our way over to the plane which was so so small!!! It took about 20 minutes (i'm guessing) to get up to the 14,000ft mark. My skydiving buddy Dan asked us how far we thought we were at one point and we guessed around 12,000 ft, we were actually only 7,500ft!! Only half way! I'm actually surprised I still have my hand, Pam was squeezing it so tight on the way up! Finally it came down to the crucial point, jumping out of the plane! I was the 4th to jump out and pam the last. We scooched down the plane to where the door was open, dangled our feet over the side, looked down and saw a mass of clouds, then crossed our arms over our chests, put our heads back and flew!!!! Obviously we didn't do it at the same time but you get the picture. The speed of falling was amazing!!! Apparently we were falling at 120mph!! Then after about a minute of free fall the parachute came out and we soured the rest of the way down, doing spins etc until we eventually came to a landing on the beach. All of us were on a complete high although a little dazed too at the fact we'd just jumped out of a plane!

That was our 1st day of adrenaline, the next day we got up at around 7:00am as we were being picked up at 7:50. We all got on the bus and headed to Tully where the main office thing was with a cafe etc. There we got our wetsuits and shoes and got on another bus for about half an hour which took us to the top of the Tully river. We were in a group of 7, which was good beacuse there were 7 of us and we were introduced to our guide Gaby. She was really nice, helped us fit our helmets etc and then took us down to the river where our raft was. We got in and were given a few guidlines on what to do if you fell out etc. In other words she scared the life out of us all!! We then headed to our first rapid called the alarm clark which certainly woke us all up!! It was massive and pretty much all of us were screaming! One raft overturned on this first rapid so we all had to save the people, dragging 3 of them into our raft! We then carried on down the rapids either paddling or getting down low in the boat or holding on for dear life! It was great and we all had so much fun! We capsized the boat at the end for fun and that was pretty much it! A full day of white water rafting at grade 4! Great fun you all have to do it, oh yeah as well as jump out of a plane!

Moving to Cairns on Saturday so you'll get another blog in a couple of weeks (if you're lucky!) haha!

Love Gem and Pam xxxx