14/11/07 - 24/11/07 Bel & Brett's House

We decided to visit Bel and Brett, Mel's old workmates from the ship, who live in Toormina, NSW, just outside of Coff's Harbour on the east coast. We took the train from Sydney, which cost about $80 and had some gorgeous scenery as we wove inbetween mountains, etc and travelled through some really pretty little towns.

The journey took around 9hours so we arrived at Sawtell train station about 9pm. I'd met Belinda last time I was in Australia, but hadn't met her husband Brett and neither me or Mel have met their 10mth old son William... who is gorgeous!!!

Staying with the Fisher family was really nice and a welcome break from backpacking, we had our own rooms and everything!!! ...and both Bel and Brett treated us to some of their great cooking... we even had a barbeque one night so finally felt like we were in Australia, hehe!!! The house is off a street called lalguli (which made me giggle every time!) and is only a few minutes away from a little beach-y area by the train track, which William seemed to love... although I still don't understand why he would want to eat sand!

We hoped to find work in Coffs so that we could spend a bit more time with these guys, but Coff's isn't a very big place so we didn't have much luck in that area and decided to move on to Melbourne. But while we were in the area we went to see the "Big Banana", which is basically just a big plastic banana!!! There are a whole load of large items across australia... the big pineapple, the big shoe... allsorts of weird and wonderful things! Can't really work out what the point is to them... but was extremely amused by all of the banana related objects n the giftshop, hehe! We also went down to the Jetty which was really pretty and wandered around a little hippy market there and the view from the lifeguard look-out up there was fab! We went up to one of the national park areas, but as we got there there was a severe weather warning so we didn't hang around too long. Other than that we spent our time playing with William and becoming addicted to series one of heroes... we spent every eveing watching episodes back to back and I loved it!!!