Paradise Lost

The plan for today was to start driving down the coast and stop at the various famous surf spots along the way: Surfers Paradise, Burleigh Heads, Kirra, Snapper Rocks, Duranbah, Coolangatta.  Bernard apologizes to all the Australians living in the area for bringing the flat surf with him.

First stop was Surfers Paradise, less than an hour's drive from Brisbane.  Bernard was very excited to see any place called Surfers PARADISE so he had high expectations.  When we got there, it was more like Surfers Hell.  Think Hungtington Beach with high-rises and more people.  To make things even better, for some reason somebody thought it was a good idea to do road construction during the middle of summer.

"Call someplace paradise..."

"...kiss it goodbye"

So disappointing.

We got out of there as quickly as we could and continued our drive down the coast.  It only took a few minutes to get to Burleigh Heads and it was much nicer.  We went to the beach there and were relieved to find it nearly empty and the water was warm and crystal clear.

Strange resident of Burleigh Heads

Nice, clean, wide, empty beach

Passing clouds at Burleigh Heads

There wasn't much surf so we decided to move on to see if we could find some.  We passed through Kirra and had to make a stop at Kirra Surf shop.  It was huge and they were having an end of season sale.  Bernard was tempted to buy some surfboards but Annemarie was the only one that left with anything... the cutest sandals!

No surf at Kirra either (see a pattern?) so we continued doing surf checks at Snapper and Duranbah in Coolangatta.  There was a little bit of surf at Point Danger but nothing great.

Windblown surf at Point Danger

After striking out in Queensland, we decided to head down to Byron Bay, New South Wales.  Since we knew Byron Bay would be touristy, we chose to try and find a place to stay in Brunswick Heads just outside of Byron Bay.

Brunswick Heads is a very small town but we managed to find a motel for a reasonable price.  As we were checking in, AM noticed the local paper and this is the front page picture.

This picture was taken TWO days before we got there at a local Brunswick Heads break.  The surf gods are cruel to Bernard.

After crying for a bit, Bernard composed himself enough for us to walk into town to get dinner.  There weren't too many choices but we managed to find an Indonesian restaurant called Rice.  We both got a dish called Samatran Balado with prawns for AM and eggplant for Bernard.  It was deeeelish!  Forgot the camera so no pics - sorry!

We were pretty full when we got done so we walked around the little town for a bit and stumbled across a fair!  It was a very small fair, but it had a bumper car ride, tilt-a-whirl, mini carousel, some games, food, bingo, and most importantly - a shooting gallery.  We tried our luck at the shooting gallery sure that it was a scam.  However, Bernard managed to hit three ducks with three shots and won our new pet, Bimby!

We named him after a nearby town.  He also comes in blue and green.

We were tired from all this excitement, so we skipped bingo and headed back to the motel to turn in for the night.

When we got back to the room, AM noticed that the clock was 1 hour ahead of our watches.  The clock in the car was also "wrong" and we had changed it to match our watch time.  We were thinking, "what were the odds that both clocks were wrong?".  Thus began the search for the real time.  Of course, this was the one hotel that did not have internet access so that was out.  We ended up flipping channels and found a news program that confirmed the motel's clock time.  We still weren't convinced because a) we didn't know what AEDT time was, and b) when we left Brisbane our watches were correct.

The mystery will be solved in our next post...