"it's a one pub, three dog kinda town"

hello all, Another Julie Nolan update coming to you from a small rainy town on the coast of Ausrtalia.

me and shanna are spending our last day in port Macquarie rained into our hostel, but it actually gives us a chance to update the blog, write emails and drink tea, so really a day of rain is good. Since we got here on friday night it's been ht and sunny everyday and we've spent all day walking around town and exploring. the first day, saturday we went to the harbour and saw the breakwall, which is kinda cool its a rock breakwall right next to town beach thats an open peoples gallery, you can write postcards on the rocks or make your mark to let the whole world know you were there, every rock face was covered in pictures and names and flags! super cool. we spent most of the day wandering and making plans for the next part of our journey, we watched toy story one and two with everyone from our hostel and we saw a momma koala running downt he main street in town with a baby on its back... so we all followed it and it climbed up a tree, it was really cute and we were really close to it port Macquarie is known for its koala hospital and koala rehililition center. we got up sunday and went to the rainforest on the edge of town and walked along the shoreline and through the stretch of protected rainforest and saw bush turkeys and probably a million lizzards and baby lizzards. then we walked to the koala hospital and saw all the injured koalas which was kidna depressing. Monday was raining but we went out for the day anyway we both needed new books for our drive today and wanted to make some more plans.

We leave here this afetrnoon and head to Coff's harbour and from there were going to rent a car to drive to the waterfall way and see the smaller towns in the dorrgio national park. theres lots of rainforest and fun species to see there so were going to take a day trip and hopefully go out on the water kayking or canoeing the next day. we plan to be around Byron bay within the next week to spend some quality time surfing and living our mcuh loved beach life style. were getting pretty good at it. haha

So since we left sydney what have we been up to you say? wellllll.... we got back t Bondi beach to spend a few days making plans repacking and went for one last surf on bondi with a few guys from teh hostel. it was fun the waves were bigger then shanna and i had surfed in before and our boards were smaller, making it harder to ballance but once we got into it it made for pretty good surfing and the water has finally warmed up enough so you didnt even need a etsuit and it was comfortable to stay out fr as long as you wanted. it was great and i have a few more battle scars from my surf board to prove im getting better. haha i think thats what it means? aha im getting used to faling off and getting tossed around for a minute before you can stand up again and now its kinda fun when you expect it to happen. We got up wednesday morning with the sun, a little sore from our surfing adventure, and coaught a seniors tour from downtown sydney out to hunter Valley the most well known wine region in australia. You know your on a seniors tour whennnn..... the bus driver addresses you as 'the young girls... you know who you are" and everyone automatically looks at you. haha the bus dropped us off in hunter valley and proceded to take 100 giddy seniors on a day of wine tasting. shanna and i checked into our hostel and grabbed bikes and spent the hot afternoon riding around from brewery-to-champainge house- to- winery - to chocolate factory tasting all that lushous valley ahs to offer. it was good fun and our biking skills were definatly tested and we actually had alot of fun doing our own tour of the valley by bike. we met up with another canadian girl form our hostel for lunch at a pub and spent the afternoon hanging out by the pool becasue it got to hot to bike around anymore. after supper we all played pictionary with a bottle of local wine and went to bed early. we spent the next day doing a real group wine tour of the valley. it was really fun to hear about the wines and be told what to taste and how. there were 6 of us ont he tour and we ahd lunch at a cafe in the botanic gardens and then we went for ice cream and to a cheese tasting... MMMMmmmm...Mmm..M.. our last day in hunter valley we decided to run from the hostel in and around town and get a see of everyhting before we ahd to leave. mostly we were just hungry and had run out of food and needed to go to the grocery store for food and it was either a 30 min walk or a ten minute run. haha much faster to run. haha we spent the afternoon eating ice cream and waiting for busses in the sun and got into Newcastle for a bus transfer with 4 hours to spare, we dropped our bags off at a local hostel for 3$ and went for dinner and to a live band on the pier for beers, a walk up the tower on the pier for a view of the sunset and abck to the bus station. we left new castle and i think we were both asleep within 10 minutes and almost slept through our stop 5 hours later so the bus driver drove us to our hostel and laughed at us, we put int he door sode nad went straight to bed as it was already 3 am. and you all know how we spent our days in Port Mac.

i actually wrote the second half from Coff's harbour casue the computer froze and published the other half on me. but we got here safe and sound and have been mostly hanging aorunf town all day today and last night, the girls in our room were awesome but they left early this morning, too bad. we rented a car fr tomorrow, its supposed to be a super nice sunny day and the hostel manager gave us a map and some pointers of where to stop on our way into waterfall way and the towns around the park adn what walks to do. were super excited!
it rained this morning so we went to target adn played dress up int he ugly 80's clothes.... it was wayyyy to much fun!
keepin it real, Love Jules!

Special thanks to the Australian geographic on a show about the outback of all outbacks for the blog title!