Fraser Island (and other heaps of new reading material)

Fraser Island is one of those places that everyone says you have to go to. So, we were hesitant about going to Fraser Island, but we got sucked into. We just finished a self-drive 4WD tour of the island with a group of 11. They company basically gave us a car without almost no instruction on how to drive it and waved us off. We wrote down our drivers license number, but they never even checked to see if we actually had one. Right... they're crazy. Once we were on the island we learned that Koala, the company we went through, had the most accidents of any self-drive company. Great. We also learned that because of all the accidents, self-drive tours would no longer be legal after this year. Alrighty. Good thing we squeezed it in. Just in time.

Fraser Island was truly amazing. We didn't roll our truck over. Perhaps that had something to do with Jen and I not driving... Fortunately, we'll never know. We had one great experienced driver in our group, Shep, who absolutely saved our asses time and time again. The entire island is sand and the inland road were crazy! Everywhere you'd go, someone was bound to get stuck in front of you. Everyone is a good sport on the island though. You can always find groups of people pushing cars out of the holes they've dug. There was one particular group, nicknamed the Crazy Asians, that were truly crazy and helped everyone. You see, you're not supposed to pull anybody with your truck or you'll lose your bond. These guys were pulling everybody and you found them pushing their truck time and time again. The best part was watching them all pile back into the moving truck, sort of like a reverse clown car. Good fun. The lucky bums we are, we only got stuck a few times and were able to get ourselves out without much trouble.

The lakes on Fraser Island were beautiful. I've never seen anything like them. Completely clear water and white sand. If you couldn't see the other side, it'd look like a brochure of Hawaii or the Carribean. Just amazing. We could have swam in them for days.

We camped on the beach at night, which had its ups and downs. You couldn't pee alone, because of fear of dingos. Lots of stories of dingos biting your bum and such. The first night of camping was great. We camped with two other trucks, drank ourselves silly and slept like babies. The second night was a different story. The day was a bit more exhausting and it was incredibly windy. This meant that the spaghetti we cooked had a crunch to it and it was impossible to keep the sand out of our tents. All night long the tent was blowing up against us and sending the sand inside flying around. Nothing like a thin coat of sand all over your body when you wake up. Had we known that it was going to be like that, we might have waited to drink ourselves silly on the second night.

Overall the trip was wonderful and our group was amazing. We made it out alive and without a single fight, which is a lot more than the other groups. And next on the agenda is a Whitsundays sailing trip for 3 days and 2 nights. It'll be a nice change of pace. Instead of cooking crunchy spaghetti and doing dishes in the sea, somebody will give us food and clean up after us. Wonderful, just what I need.

Hope all is well in the states. We'd love to hear what everybody is up to these days. Jump in a pile of leaves for us.