on my way Backpacking, roadtripping and travelling the world

Easter Break – Sunshine and Fraser Coast

Obviously I either don't have much time during my teaching periods to write new posts in my blog, or the 'business as usual' isn't that interesting to be mentioned.
But actually quite some stuff happened in the last 2 months, since I last wrote something. Some weeks ago I had my first 'visitors' from 'Germany' here in Brisbane. The temporary 'Aussies' Marina and Hannes came for a couple of days to Brisbane before they left towards home making a stop-over in South-East Asia. They left me with 'Milhouse' their van, which accompanied them on their Australia trip for almost 6 months. As they couldn't sell it in time, I have to care of it now.
Some weeks later my flatmate Axel moved out and left to New Zealand in order to travel, work and learn a bit more English. In the meantime he's back in Australia and travel from Melbourne via Sydney to be back in Brissie in one or two weeks before he leave back home to Spain. Now Julia from Germany moved in, so we have as many Germans living in the house as we have Australians - we Germans are everywhere
At the end of my teaching period Vinc from back home came to visit me as well. He first visited Fred and Franzi in Melbourne and came to Brisbane after spending another week in Sydney. After showing him around in Brisbane the next day we then picked up Fred and Franzi from the airport and drove with Milhouse up north the coast all the way to Agnes Water/Town of 1770, passing Rainbow Beach on our way. Town of 1770 is the place James Cook first landed in Australia in May 1770. We had planned to do a snorkeling trip to the southern tip of the Great Barrier Reef, but because of the rough sea it was considered to be too dangerous, so it was cancelled. Instead we spend all day at the beach, enjoying the fine sand, the big waves and the hot sun.
As we only had one week (It was the Easter break) we had to head back south where we again stopped in Rainbow Beach to start out 3-day Fraser Island tour the next day.
In a group of 20 people in three Landcruiser jeeps, we had a great time driving the big jeeps on the sandy and muddy 'roads' and beaches - great fun. A little bit like driving in the snow - damn I miss winter and snowboarding…
The weather was quite changing all the time, but we had a decent amount of hours with sunshine, even though it was quite cloudy and rainy from time to time. On the morning of day three it rained so hard, that our campsite turned into a huge lake.
As already mentioned, we stayed the two nights in small tents and had a big kitchen shelter, where we had a BBQ on both evenings. Til late our cool Kiwi guide Harps played the guitar and for some of us it was pretty hard to wake up the next morning and especially sit in the car for the bumpy ride. Even though no one had drive a jeep before in deep sand, we didn’t got stuck one time, so after three days full of sandy adventures, including dingoes, (dead) snakes and nice walks to several lakes including swimming in them, we returned to Rainbow Beach.
The next day we had to go back to Brisbane and while Vinc and I together with all my housemates visited the Caxton Street Food and Wine Festival (a nice description of a huge public piss-up ) in the evening, Fred and Franzi flew back to Melbourne. Vinc followed them the next day to the airport in order to fly back home to Germany.
And me, I had to start studying again. After this one week off, which felt like several weeks, it was a bit hard to get used to uni again, but in the meantime I’m again almost half way through my teaching period. You can’t really afford to put much effort into the studies, as the 6 week teaching periods make it quite tough. And in addition I had to realise that enrolling on all the units isn’t as easy as it looks like, especially because some units are offered on the same time-slot, which places some constraints on my study plan. But with careful planning and one or two more intense teaching periods I will be to take a teaching period of at the end of the year, in order to travel around maybe in Australia and New Zealand.
But right now I am looking forward to the end of this teaching period, as I will be flying back home mid of June and beside visiting my parents and maybe my grand ma I am excited to take part in my friends wedding in Tuscany. As the winter is slowly coming to Brisbane, and you need a jumper and socks in the evenings, this will be a nice opportunity to enjoy some more summer.