Friday 15th January.

When we woke up it was raining, it fact it rained most of the day. We didn't mind as we had plans to be indoors for most of the day anyway. We sat and had breakfast and chatted to Debbie and David, as Jess was at work. They reminded us of our own Mum and Dad and were so lovely and easy to get along with. They got us some umbrellas for the drizzly weather and we headed off on our own to Billabong Zoo. I am borderline obsessed with Koala Bears and have never seen one in person, but were told we could stroke them at the zoo. It's illegal to hold them in this state, but I hope to do that when we get up to Brisbane. We arrived five minutes before the Koala feeding time so we headed straight for them. I even surprised myself at how excited I was when we got to them and they were moving around on their trees. Brad, who worked there, came and picked one up and brought him out for us to take photos of and stroke. We were told to approach in small groups. I pushed all the kids out the way to get to the front, and Kirsty had to tell me to move on so other people could get to see it. It felt different to how I imagine and had really coarse fur. It just watched me the whole time, probably wondering why I was so excited. Kirsty finally managed to drag me out of there and we went to go and see the other animals. There were monkeys, snow leopards, dingos, meerkats, wombats. We went to watch a crocodile feeding and it was jumping out the water to grab the food, then went to feed the kangaroos. We were allowed to walk in with them and they were chasing us around because they knew we had treats. One of them had a baby joey in her pouch. It was really cute. It took me a while to trust them for me to hand feed them, so Kirsty kept laughing at me dropping the food in front of them at first. Once we finished amusing ourselves at the zoo, I drove us to the Koala Hospital. They take any injured Koala's in the area here and nurse them back to health for them to return to the wild, or they keep them there if it's not safe for them to go back. When we arrived there was a Koala just arriving in the 'Koala ambulance'. It was too sick to be looked after at the site so they took it straight to a vet in the city centre. The majority of people who work here are volunteers and it was free to go in and be shown a tour, but they do take donations to support the hospital. We got to see some Koala's that had been rescued and were being fed through a syringe. One of them wouldn't come down the tree for it's food which we thought was funny. They were trying everything to entice it but it wasn't interested. We stayed there for about an hour but the rain wasn't clearing up so we headed back to Jess's to shower and change. Jess came home with Matt after work and they were joking around with alcohol in brown paper bags. I made a joke the day before about it usually being something you see people on park benches do. The four of us went to the liquor store which is supposed to be a drive through but we had to get out the car, which was a bit random. We picked up some wine to go with dinner then went back to eat. Debbie and David did a BBQ for us all which was lovely. It felt like being at home. They were playing Marvin Gaye and we were all singing along. After a few drinks we decided to all go out. We went to a couple of bars and just got even more drunk. Matt couldn't get in the second place as he didn't have his I.D. Debbie was telling us she had another personality when she was drunk which she called Dolores, and she was hilarious. I also went to go to the (unisex) toilet and saw some sick in the sink which some man who was stumbling out there swore wasn't him, but I later found out was Kirsty during a not so classy moment earlier in the night! After a lot of dancing drinking and mingling we were eventually asked to leave because Debbie was falling off the stall she was sat on! We all piled in a mini bus and headed back to the house, I'd had a really good day.