Where can I start to describe a day that was pretty much a nightmare!?

We left Airlie Beach and set off towards Townsville, where Sooz and I left the bus behind and stopped for lunch. This meant walking forever to the ferry to head over to Magnetic Island, which is probably where my bad mood began. My bag, although I love the wheels, can be difficult to pull. It doesn't have a sticky out handle so crashes into my legs alot. And the handle it does have absolutely kills my hands if I pull it for more than about a minute. So much so that I could barely write by the time we reached our lunch destination and that was only a 5 minute walk! I made the dreadful decision to put the bag on my back (for the first time in almost 8 weeks!) for the walk to the ferry terminal. I nearly died!!! It's sooooooo heavy and it just gets hotter here the further north you are. Reaching the ferry was a massive relief, however this was short lived as Sooz and I managed to sit ourselves in the wet seat, where we got splashed constantly by the waves. Our attempts to resolve this problem by walking upstairs were ill thought out. It was all we could do to get to the top of the stairs and grip on to the railing at the top, let alone managing to make it to a seat or the safety of indoors! To make matters worse I had chosen that day to wear a very short very unreliable skirt which thought it would be fun to spend the remaining ferry journey attempting to fly up around my waist. Holding down a skirt and keeping yourself upright is not easy!

Back on dry land we hopped on the local bus to our hostel. This was where my mood progressively worsened. There was nothing, apart from a chinese restaurant which was alway closed, a charity shop (again closed) and a yucky bar frequented only by yucky men from what I could see. The hostel left a lot to be desired. The rooms were tiny, nothing looked very clean, generally it was just not somewhere I wanted to be! Poor Soozie had to deal with my bad mood for some time on Magnetic.

We had two days there, and spent most of the time on the beach, after our attempts at walking to the WW2 forts were thwarted by rain. Thankfully we did actually find shops with real food and drinks over in Horseshoe Bay (a good 30 min bus ride away). We also had a very naughy but very lovely pancake breakfast in a little cafe :-) it's amazing how food can cheer me up! Our stay was very uneventful and peaceful in the end. Although we were disappointed to not be celebrating Halloween, after we'd discussed outfits for so long beforehand! Turns out you should always listen to the Oz Experience drivers when they tell you to stay at Base (where there was a party), even if you have had bad base experiences previously!