Despite leaving Sydney over an hour late and it being total chaos, the
overnight bus to Byron Bay actually arrived on time and we were
somewhat unceremoniously dumped at a little hut in the early hours of
Monday morning.

Unfortunately a bad mix of bleary eyed tiredness, the worlds worst map
and the heat that was growing minute by minute meant that we then
spent the next hour and a bit walking round with all our gear getting
lost whilst trying to find our hostel. It actually reached the point
where I had given up and decided it must just not exist, but we
finally got on the right track and as if to take the Mick, the free
shuttle picked us up just as we were litterally a couple of hundred
yards from our very hippie style hostel!

We spent the rest of the day toasting on the beach and de-stressing
(everything is relative I know!) and we actually ended up having a
really good day on what is a nice beach. Byron itself has a really
chilled out feel and after the hustle & bustle of 10 days in Sydney it
was exactly what we were after. When it dawned on us that it if we
were back home it would be the first Monday of busy season, we
realised how lucky we were and it sure beat the start of the working
week back home!

In the eveing we cooked in and went for a quiet drink at Buddha bar
before getting an early night in our slightly shack style dorm
(complete with plenty of 8 legged friends) so that we were well
refreshed for our surf lesson the following day.

This would turn out to be a half day of really good fun, but one
whereby the end of it we felt like we has been in a washing machine
for 4 hours! As if trying to stand up on the board wasn't hard enough
(it really isn't as easy as it looks!), constantly being battered by
the waves and having to swim against the tide just to maintain your
position meant that by the end of it all we really were knackered! I
managed to stand up 3 times, which I was (not so) quietly pleased
with, and Hutch managed it with the help of both instructors holding
the board and pulling her onto it after she had a little bit of a
strop!!

Anyway in the afternoon we rested our weary limbs on the beach again
and then had some well earned drinks at Cheeky Monkeys, a Byron
institution, in the evening. All the table dancing must have been a
bit too much for some people to handle as one girl actually came up to
me and told me that I was a 'very good dancer'! Really?!?!

In the morning we were nursing our slightly sore heads over a
leisurely breakfast when Hutch casually said that she would go and
check our Greyhound tickets just to double check that it was at 1230
as we had both been convinced all week. I knew straight away from the
look on her face that it wasn't as she came back - in fact we hadn't
even been close; it had left at 740am!! The pair of us couldn't
believe how stupid we had been given that the same thing had happened
in Sydney only a couple of days ago and that we knew how pushed we
were for time up the East coast that we really couldn't afford any
mishaps! Clowns!!

We sat there for a good few minutes amazed that neither of us had once
questioned ourselves and bothered to check, but then eventually we got
ourselves in gear and to be honest responded really well and came up
with a good solution to the pickle we had got ourselves in quickly.

There wasn't another bus direct to Rainbow Beach later that day but
our next best option was to get a bus to Brisbane at around 6pm and
then spend the night there before getting the 7am bus on to Rainbow
early the following morning - which luckily meant that we could still
make it to Rainbow in time for our briefing! Not ideal but it was our
best and only option to make sure we stayed on track to do all our
trips, and so we had a chilled out (and unexpected!) afternoon in
Byron once we had overcome the realisation of missing the bus, and
then rocked up in the rain in Brissy around 9pm.

In our hostel we got taking to a couple who were doing a very similar
route to us and they were saying how they were having to fly over
Rockhampton due to the flooding there, because no buses were able to
pass through. We both admitted that it was only then when they
mentioned it that it even crossed our minds that we would have to do
something similar - we had been carrying on assuming that everything
would be ok by the time we made our way further north, but it was
clear that things had become more desperate! Anyway, we would finally
act on that a day later!!