Sunday 12th April

After arriving early in Sydney we headed to our base hostel in the centre of sydney in paddington. Feeling a bit tired we chilled out in the hostel for most of the day only to find out later on that afternoon that sam was leaving the next day. Because it was sam s last night we decided that we had to make it a big one! Me, guy, slates and sam headed out for a really nice dinner down in circular quay looking over the whole of sydney harbor at night it was a really nice supper with an awesome view! After dinner we headed back to the hostel and set up our last lash bucket (huckleberry) for sam! We sat downstairs and polished off our now world famous crunk juice before heading out into sydney for another very amusing evening. Slater got a little bit of purple face (lash rash) and had to stay in which was a shame but pussyitis does kick in every now and again! But we had a very amusing drunken evening in kings cross and ended up walking the whole way home which took a good 40mins at 4 in the morn!!

Monday 13th April

We were all very sad to loose our first member from travelling, sam! But with sam leaving we had the arrival of two new team members gareth and paynel! It was awesome to see gaz as i hadn't seen him since october as he had been playing rugby in singapore and it was good to see paynel to as usual bringing a lot of banter and humor into the group.

In the afternoon we headed down to the sydney aquarium which was really cool, loads of weird and wondeful sea creatures and a must do when your in sydney!

Tuesday 14th April

The day we picked the campervan up!! We picked up our home on wheels, with 431,000km on the clock, it is in pretty good nick really which is good and a bit bigger than i first imagined. So now we were set up for getting around Oz we though we had to head down to Bondi beach and chill in the sun. we had an awesome afternoon playing touch on bondi and body surfing in the big aussie waves. After our afternoon at the beach we headed to the nearest campsite which happened to be quite a while out of town, all three vans got lost and it took us over an hour to do about 15km we ended up in the airport which was quite amusing but what can u do when you have a s*** map! When we eventually got to the campsite it started to rain hard so we ended staying in the campervans all night drinking Goon (the cheapest booze in the world, 5 lites of wine is around $12!!), was a fun evening though especially as we managed to fit all 8 of us around the table in our van.

Wednesday 15th April

We headed over to manly (what i reckon is the wimbledon of sydney) and chilled on manly beach all day. We drove over sydney harbor bridge on the way which was awesome especially as it was a beautiful day! I met up with Emma FP which was really nice and she showed me around manly as she had been living there for the past 3 months or so. She showed us this awesome free carpark which was really quite and right on the beach so we ended up staying here for a few nights. In the afternoon i had a little go at surfing on manly beach, i managed to get up a few times so i got a little overconfident and went out to far and got absolutely nailed by a massive wave, completely washing machined!!

After our chilled arvo on the beach i dropped FP at the ferry over to central sydney and headed back to our little car park (Little manly cove) we then had an awesome game of touch and then went for a long swim to cool down, we found these wooden post to jump off so we played around on them for a while. We then got ready to got out for a big night in sydney! After an awesome thai at pacific thai and some crunk juice we headed over on the manly ferry getting some amazing views of sydney harbor at night! We then headed over to bondi junction andf then to kings cross where we ended up in world bar till the end of the evening, with teapots of cocktails being drunk all through the night! After an awesome evening we grabbed a kebab walked around aimlessly to waste time whilst we waiting for the first ferry back to manly at 6 20 am!! Eventually the time passed and we jumped on the ferry where again we got an awesome view of sydney harbor at sunrise. Me and gareth went and got some breakfast as soon as we got to manly and then i ended up going to bed at 8 am!! An awesome evening!!

Thursday 16th April

After a very long sleep to recover from the previous evenings/mornings antics we headed over to manly beach again! We all got an imitation ferg burger for lunch and then chilled on the beach in the sun all afternoon catching up on some well earned rest. Then after a bit of touch on the beach we had some supper and headed over to bondi junstion in the van to see our old rugby coach, Blackburn. It was really nice to see him again and we had a nice few pints in an irish bar and caught up on the old rugby times!

Friday 17th April

We woke up nice and early in our nice little spot in Manly cove and headed straight into sydney over the harbor bridge. We uickly went and printed off some directions on how to get into the middle of nowhere and then started our drive up the coast to george's farm. It was a 450km drive which was pretty crazy! For the first 200km we had nice motorways until we turned off and headed up and down national park hills/mountains on small windy roads. All i can say is the campervan is not exactly a lotus elise! Eventually we took it in turns driving/map reading and sleeping in the back. Me and guy where in the front for the last leg where we were driving downhill through thick fog into thunder and lightening! We saw thunderbolts hitting the ground about a mile in front of us so that was pretty crazy. We eventually got to Walcha though (george's nearest town) and then headed off not seeing 1 car for 50km and driving along small roads in the dark not really knowing where we were going. We eventually got there though and it was really nice to see george. He knocked us up some food and we had a few beers then went to bed.