Day 15 - Aussie 2011

This guy in our room closed the curtains last night so I woke up feeling like it was pretty early when in fact is was already going on 8am. The curtains were blocking all the light and everyone was still asleep when we left at 9am. I sure am glad I got up when I did, despite the dark, because we had a full day of lounging ahead of us!

I checked the weather again in the morning and all the showers and thunderstorms had disappeared from the forecast to be replaced by sunshine! Wow, how perfect is that! So we were on for our plans to hit up the Gold Coast and do nothing but beach it up!

We took a train and a bus down there, with a total travel time of two hours between our hostel and the beach. Luckily we had our books and drawing pads to pass the time.

On our way to the beach, we realized we had no towels and happened to be passing a gift shop with towels at just that moment. We both bought one with Australia designs on it and I really like what we picked out (see photos).

The beach was great. The sand was really fine and we spent most of our time reading and napping. When it came time to get in the water, I braced myself for the cold but was pleasantly surprised by waters as warm as Hawaii! Yay!

The water was fun, though certainly not for leisure swimming. The waves were nonstop and kept us on our toes the whole time. Nick was checking out his not-so-great sunscreen application on his chest at one point and got very unexpectedly pummeled in the face by a wave in the process. Although I felt bad at my much-too-late warning (“look out!”.. BAM!) I had to laugh at how perfectly tragic it was, the man standing there unaware of the wave ready to crash directly onto his face. Sad.

The only downside was the crowd. They have flags set up and you have to swim between the flags only. Unfortunately, that crams everyone in the same spots but luckily we were able to find our own everytime.

We were at a place called Surfers Paradise, which has cool high rise buildings all around. The downside is the buildings start blocking the sun at about 4pm. Still, we had a good 4.5 hours on the beach and I loved being lazy for a day.

We ate at a place called Santinos that had All You Can Eat Pizza and Pasta for $10 a person. Not too shabby and I especially liked the pizza. We went back to Brisbane after that and made it to the hostel around 9pm. Both of us were pretty beat by the sun and the waves but I took the time to take a hot shower and blog before bed.

A nice relaxing day and now I can say I have been to the beautiful Gold Coast beach!

Pictures:

 

Nick reading his book (he is a book addict now) on our cool new towels at Surfers Paradise.

 

A view of some of the buildings from the beach at Surfers Paradise.

Our towels! Nick got an Aboriginal boomerang design and mine says australia on both ends.  I just liked the colors!