Today has been truly momentous as, after a few delays on the way, we finally said goodbye to Brisbane and Queensland and headed on south into New South Wales and territory's anew!

Our departure was delayed for a few days due to severe hangovers on Friday after one too many leaving drinks with our friends from work the evening before and meeting up with so many people on Saturday. Not to mention the incredible lack of preparation we had done in terms of getting our stuff packed away and actually working out how everything was supposed to fit into Fergal. So after yesterday was spend arranging and rearranging the car and throwing out so much of the stuff that we really had no need for (do two people really need seven seats in a car or four camp chairs?) we were finally ready this morning to hit the road once again.

It was with mixed feelings that we travelled along, as although we had both been looking forward to this point for a long time, we had also made many friends in Brisbane and it Queensland had been a good home to us for over a year. We were also acutely aware that the further south we progressed the colder it was more likely to become!!

Once we were on the road we were soon leaving Queensland behind us and into New South Wales where we drove through Byron Bay and Lennox Head before stopping at a lookout point to take one last look at what we were leaving behind. After a little while longer we decided to stop for the day at a little town called Ballina, where we were pleased to see that the sun was still shining down on us. Once we had our tent up we took a stroll into the town centre to see what was about and found the supermarket and bottle shop, which was enough exploring for us for one day!

Ballina is a lovely little town that somehow manages to attract almost no tourists despite being less than an hour from Byron Bay and sitting right on the banks of a river and the beach. As the woman at the caravan park said "it's our little secret" and this was most evident in the fact that we were half the age of everyone else staying in the park!

Tomorrow we are moving on again as we are aiming to get over half way to Sydney so that we can start to explore areas that we haven't been to before.