On March 10th we drove to Mon Repos Beach arriving just in time to sign up for the evening Beach walk/loggerhead turtle observation. They didn't guarantee that we would see anything but in order to walk on the beach at night you had to be with a guide (because it was the season that mom logger heads were arriving to lay eggs on the beach and some of the babies from the early nests were emerging.)
It was a long night - they asked us to be there at 7:00pm but there were so many people and we had to go in shifts that we didn't get to walk the beach until 11:30pm. In the mean time they played movies for us in the out door theater and we enjoyed the museum. We didn't see any moms laying eggs but we got to see about 90 baby loggerheads emerging from the sand and making their way to the water. They wouldn't let us take any pictures of the turtles, except when they - the guides) picked up and passed around a few of them for us to see up close so sorry about the bad picture. We got back to our camp and crashed at 1:00am after a memorable evening.
That night we stayed at a camper park with laundry, showers and a pool - very extravagant for us. The next morning, Woody cooked me eggs and potatoes for breakfast while we did the laundry. What a treat!
Driving a bit further south, we entered into feral/wild Horse country. That night we camped on the Inskip peninsula and woke up the next morning to these two horses out side our tent. They left us alone as we ate our breakfast but looked curious when we took down the tent and drove off.
Before leaving the area we wanted to hike to the colored sand cliffs but it was high tide and we you could only get there at low tide so following the directions of a helpful couple we were told of another hike called the "sand blow". We didn't have any idea what a "sand blow" was but they told us we would be able to see the colored sand cliffs from above if we went on the hike so off we went. It was a short hike through rainforest and eucalyptus trees before we arrived at the sand blow - how to explain this phenomenon....... It was like we had walked into the dessert.
It wasn't very wide - we could see the other side (maybe 1/2 mile across) but it was a few miles long and daily it was getting longer. The wind was blowing the sand from the beach below us (we were up on a cliff above the beach) up the cliff and across the sand blow - it was a like a wind tunnel. As the sand blew inland it covered trees and forest in it's way. It was hot and windy and so cool we forgot all about looking for the colored sand cliffs and just took pictures of the sand blow.
Continuing south on our way to Byron Bay we drove through the town of Gympie, a town whose name has brought us many laughs.
One evening on the boat we were watching T.V. after dinner when a news reporter said " a gimpy family was rescued from the roof of their home...." I looked over at Woody and said "Did they just call that family gimpy?" He responded, "That's what I heard." Before I could ask how a family of invalids could climb onto the roof of their house, Kate - noticing our confusion- turned to us and without a trace of irony said, "There is a town called Gympie near Brisbane." "Oh...." I replied. Later that night, in the privacy of stateroom, Woody and I laughed so hard our teeth hurt.
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