March 18, 2005

Today would have been a lot better if we hadn't had the worst sunburn ever. Well, the one I had in Hawaii may have been worse but we were in a ton of pain all day. But, that didn't stop us from exploring more of Australia. We started the day back at the mall running some errands. We realized that we really didn't want to spend our vacation in malls, but noting the small differences is always fun. You can pretty much get anything you want at a mall, including your groceries. They also have butchers there as well as, in this instance, a library and police beat (station).

Afterward, we started on our journey toward Sydney. We found the drive to be beautiful. The land here in Northern Queensland is lush and green. It is mostly tropical rain forest. There are crops of sugarcane, bananas and even papayas. I don't think I've ever seen any place so green. It reminds me of Hawaii, but this is even greener. We found a turnoff to Josephine Falls so we went off the beaten path, took a walkabout and found the falls. Andy insisted on going swimming in the pool at the bottom. He has loved doing that ever since he did that at Yosemite. He enjoyed getting caught in the whirlpool and sliding down the rock slide. It was like a tropical paradise. Vienna and I chose to watch from the sidelines and take pics. Climbing on the rocks was fun though. I always enjoy that.

We then took another detour to visit a small town called Innisfair. We love exploring small towns that most tourists wouldn't see. Here, we walked around the downtown and had some ice cream. It was a very quaint little town with some nice old art deco that Andy loves. From here, we continued on our way and ended our day's journey at Townsville. A strange name for a town, we all agreed. But we were able to find a nice low-cost motel and had a good meal at a local Italian restaurant, called Pizza Napoli. Pizza here is a bit different. They have different toppings than we're used to. They really like the eggs and capsicum. We were very careful with what we ordered on ours so it was good. Tonight we are relaxing: we took a swim in the pool to cool off our sunburns, did some laundry and are now watching the Charlie's Angels movie on TV. Australia is great, plus we can still watch cool movies. Tomorrow, more adventures along the east coast of Australia. We may make it to Brisbane.

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