Saturday 21 March 2015

So, it's been a while...

It's been almost 2 months since I've posted something, so much has happened.

I'll start where I left off, as usual. 
The past few weeks I hopped from one place to another by the week.

Starting begin February in Surfers paradise, Gold Coast QLD.

 By February 4th I had crossed the border to my 5th state, Queensland. 
After realising the time had changed (1hour back to Sydney) and having had a walk one the beach, I met up with Jenny.
(I met Jenny on my first farm down in Victoria)
It was so good to see her again! And I was welcome to stay at here place while I was in surfers, which was awesome obviously.

Good food, great beer and awesome people! What a good place to be!





My first evening Jenny took me out for dinner and some drinks.

The following days I went to the beach a couple of times and met up with a girl who would maybe want to travel up the east coast with me.
Together we went to the Max Brenner chocolatier and treated ourselves tremendously with these goodies. Them we walked all the way back to surfers from Burleigh heads. Which was a very pleasant (long) walk over the beach where we came across some stunningly blue jellyfish,
                                    
Had a pretty almost-sunset view 
And saw the Gold Coast at a different angle in the distance.

This, is Socrates (or sox, whichever takes your preference) the most beautiful fluffy cat ever. Absolutely adorable.

Also spotted at Gold Coast: a beautiful moving rainbow.
You can clearly see the dark raincloud move over sea while the sun is stil shining bright which gave these awesome pictures.

But after nearly a week I was getting sick.  I found a farm quite quick 90km North of Brisbane and decided to go there. So by the 11th I drove up to Stanmore.            This became a merely 36hour interlude as it wasn't what I was looking for as a horse farm to work on, so it didn't work. And on top of that I was only getting more sick. (Not eating, not sleeping well, always extremely tired, ... ) The Picture shows my Pumba surrounded by horsies when I woke up.

I was very lucky that my dad gave me the phone number and adress of the daughter of a family friend who lives in Port Macquarie, NSW. 
After the second night I left early in the morning back towards NSW. It was a far way back down, the first day I managed to drive over 600km back to Coffs Harbour in just over 6 hours, I think. 
The next day I only had a good hour and a halfs drive to go to Port. But I had exhausted myself the previous day to the point where I wasn't even able to drive more than 45min at a time without seriously needing to pull over and sleep a bit again. I pulled over once, ended up sleeping nearly an hour and did the remaining part of the drive down.

It was just past lunchtime when I arrived in Port Macquarie at Eva's house. 
The mere thought of having a warm welcome place to stay made me feel better already. 
I spent the afternoon walking, talking, having lunch and an ice cream with Eva. It was great to have such a good talk about everything and nothing and in Dutch for that matter!
It was nearly 4 o'clock by the time we got back home, Eva showed me where I could sleep (a big couch-bed). I layed down not long after and fell asleep almost immediately. 
I slept for nearly 3 days straight, only waking up occasionally to go to the bathroom or to have a bit of toast. 
I was completely exhausted. I had pushed my body to the limit.
Bad sleep and unhappiness had made me physically sick.

DELISH!
After 3 days of not much more than sleeping, I got better. I had more energy to actually get up out of bed to make and eat a proper meal, to take a shower or go on the internet to talk to some people back home.
By the time I left Eva's I felt so much better and to celebrate this (and me having a bit of my appetite back) I treated myself to a slice of chocolate mud cake and a coffee before I left the beautiful little city of Port Macquarie (in the rain, I might add).

 The following week I would spend in a little town called Bulahdelah. Again about an hour and half South of Port Macquarie.
The reason I would be there was the fact that Laura was there on a farm on her own for at least another week (after having spent the previous week alone already because the owners had to go work on a cruise ship). 
aura is the other awesome girl from my first farm down south.
This little horse farm was located 5min into a national park and another almost 10min from the highway and so absolutely in the middle of nowhere with kangaroos in abundance.

 We met up with a girl from town and went down to Newcastle for a great dinner and some drinks,

Took a two and a half hour drive (one way) to the Ellenborough falls, 
And went out into the national park for a ride with the horses once.

It was a very good week. 
As Laura needed to be in Sydney airport Friday evening for her flight to Fiji the following morning and I had to be there too (a few days later) we drove down together making a detour to Hawks nest and tea gardens again to say bye to Roxy (the girl we met up with earlier that week).
We stopped at these huge sand dunes for some pictures along the way to the tea gardens.

Oh and we saw two enormous lizards at the Ellenborough falls while eating our well deserved treat of warm apple, pear and rubbarb crumble with ice cream after walking the more than 650 steps down and up again to the base of the waterfall.

After dropping off Laura at the departure terminal of Sydney international airport I drove back north nearly and hour. Up to Cattai. Here Katrien had arranged a couchsurfer for us, but as she would be arriving 4 days later I drove up there alone that Friday evening. 

Katrien, my second oldest sister, had arranged to fly down here a month early and to arrive in Sydney instead of Perth .
So I stayed in the couchsurfing community for a couple of days until she arrived. 
I had a big comfy queen size bed to myself and had hung up my mosquito net which made my little area look like a princesses one.
Surrounded by not much more than national parks, I visited the Cattai National Park a few times and came across these fellas hanging about.

Until here my adventures alone, for my big sister would be joining me very soon.

Lots of love
xoxo Lizzie


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