Dear Everyone,
At one point we thought we might just abandon the blog as we were so far behind and having far too much fun on the road to sit down every night and keep it up. But we’ve changed our mind (lucky you!!). While some minor details might be missing – we’re going to try and give you all the highlights of the last 5 or 6 months.
Ok, here we go. Last time we left you we had just arrived at Caloundra and settled into our little unit. Riley went off to sea and all Emma’s job hunting efforts did not pay off – apparently no one goes to Caloundra in winter and so there were no jobs going. After a while the cabin fever started to set in and in an attempt to save a bit of sanity, Emma went along and volunteered a few days a week at the Caloundra Hospital in the cafe where she met some lovely old ladies with purple hair who spent every afternoon drinking at the pub after they finished at the hospital. Learnt a lot of valuable life lessons from those ladies. Beer is good.
Eventually, Riley came home again and after a very last minute change of heart (and a lot of peer pressure from Georgie!) – we decided to buy some tickets to Splendour in the Grass at Woodford. So we packed up the caravan, found a lovely family to look after Bonnie, and set off on our adventure. While all the other campers were setting up tents at night in the rain and mud – we felt like royalty rocking up with the caravan (where we also managed to hide a lot of alcohol). It was the most incredible weekend, with the most amazing line up imaginable. And we want to give a shout out to everyone in the Splendour Crew who we camped/partied with that weekend – bloody awesome group of people! We miss you all and can’t wait to catch up again somewhere down the track. We also want to give a shout out to Tom the Tripper who ate dog sausages.
After Splendour where we damaged our bodies, brains and livers. We thought it might be a good idea to do something good for ourselves. So we turned around and headed south for a few days... to Mt. Warning. We met up with the other Oxenbridges, put our walking shoes on, packed a few bags, and set off up the mountain. This was one of the hardest things we’ve done. After we were nearly at the top and thought we had finished the climb, we looked up and realised there was still about a 50 meter almost vertical rock climb ahead of us. While we were struggling to pull ourselves up the mountain, Riley managed to power through – not only carrying himself, but also with his one year old niece Sianna on his back! Go Riley! The view at the top was incredible though and when we finally reached the bottom 5 or 6 hours later the feeling of achievement was worth every wobbly, sore muscle. The next day we decided we’d check out the little hippy town of Nimbin while we were in the area.. haha.. enough said really.
Now it was time to get back to the real adventure. We went back to the unit and packed it up and hit the road again – heading north, to the sunshine! Our first stop was a highly recommended camp area at Inskip Point (Rainbow Beach). After trying to drive down a few very sandy roads and getting bogged a few times, we decided the caravan actually wasn’t designed for 4 wheel driving and camped in a more suitable area. We weren’t disappointed. This was one of our favourite places so far. Although we couldn’t go to Fraser Island as it’s a national park and we had Bonnie with us, we took our banana lounges to the beach with a box of red and looked at Fraser Island while the sun set. Very romantic! It was here that Bonnie tried to take the leg off some Pommy guy who was walking past us on the beach. He stopped to say hello and give Bonnie a cuddle and introduced himself as Paul. Little did we know, this was the start of an adventure and fun filled couple of weeks with Paul, his fiancée Hayley and their van – the Little Soldier. The next night they invited us to their campsite so we got a couple chairs, a box of red, and Bonnie and headed over. We’re not really sure what happened that night, but we ended up crawling in to bed at about 3am and woke up with some killer hangovers, and some new best friends.
Ok we think that’s enough for this blog entry. But stay tuned over the next couple of days, we’ll take you from Inskip Point to Airlie Beach via a lot of truck stops, some pancake parties, a lot of time spent stuck on a beach and a lot of goon sacks.
Riley + Emma xx
