Another hot and sunny day in Surfers Paradise = another trip to the beach for us! On the way into town we stopped at a Backpacker travel company to enquire about packages to go to Fraser Island and The Whitsundays…about an hour later we were all booked up. We were lucky to get booked in as it's really busy at this time of year, and the woman who booked it said if we'd left it another day we wouldn't have got it. So, us and Kelly are doing a 2-night self drive 4WD trip on Fraser Island, followed by a 2-night sailing trip around the Whitsundays. The package came with 2 nights accommodation included, and as we couldn't get on the trips we first wanted, the woman threw in an extra free night! We're doing 2 overnight Greyhound journies too, which saves us money on hostels. It's all very exciting and didn't end up costing us as much as we thought it would. Just before we left to go into town, I checked my emails and had one from home to say I'd had a $152 speeding fine from the day we returned the campervan in Melbourne, so we were cheered up by booking this trip, and my parents have very kindly paid the fine so we didn't have to!

We grabbed some lunch then spent a few hours on the beach. It was a bit overcast in the afternoon, so we left the beach in case it started to rain. This weekend in Surfers there's an Elvis Presley birthday bash going on, including an Elvis Tribute Act (ETA for short) contest - the winner gets to represent Australia at a big contest in Memphis later this year. We'd read about it earlier in the week, so went to have a look as it's all free. We ended up watching 3 of the ETAs perform; the final is tomorrow when the winner is announced so we might come back to see that too. The contestants we saw were a bit of a mixed bunch - one was good, but the other 2 were dodgy.

We went back to the hostel early to get ready as tonight is the Backpacker Big Night Out Club Crawl, which starts with a BBQ at the hostel at 6pm. The BBQ was quite basic but we got chatting to quite a lot of people - the cricketers that we met in Port Maquarie, a Norwegian guy who moved into our room today and is here to study at a Uni nearby, 2 English girls (one working in Sydney and her friend who is visiting her for a few weeks) and 2 Canadian brothers who were the same ages as us. After a couple of $7 bottles of wine from the bar (which cost $2.90 in Dan Murphy's - the cheap booze shop!), the bus arrived to take us into town to the clubs. Usually when we do crawls like this with a hostel they take you to a few pubs, but on this one we went to 4 clubs, got in free to them all and got really good drinks offers. We managed to get a few free drinks out of the cricketers too - well, they've got more money than us!

All in all, it was a good night, polished off with another Ozzie takeaway, although Dave opted for his traditional pizza this time, rather than his amazing pie from the other night. We walked back to the hostel and had cans of diet coke outside, chatting to the 2 English girls, before retiring for the night.