Noosa Beach... The east Coast Starts!

After Melbourne I flew to Brisbane to finish up paperwork at the head office and to see some old friends. I ended up staying with my friend Lena, whom I had worked with for a few weeks when I first started my photography job. As many of you may be aware, I love to inspire travel in others. Not often does it happen that someone jumps on my gang wagon though, but here, I was successful! Lena and her husband Peter decided to drive me up the coast to Noosa and take a mini vacation themselves. We had a fabulous 2 days there. We went on 2 different hikes and took a tour of the beaches :) Noosa was a beautiful beach, but a bit to touristy and "marked up" for me. It did however remind me of some more built up, yet still small touristy beach areas in the Carolinas. It was a quick two days as time flies by when your having fun! P.S. Did I mention how beautiful the sunsets were?
More Pictures can be found at http://picasaweb.google.com/find.barlow/Noosa#

Melbourne Craziness with Charlie!

I left Tasmania sad to leave old friends but ready to move on... Ready to take on the world! I feel so happy and ready to travel on. Australia has been a great place to not only financially prepare myself, but to mentally prepare myself for the rest of my travels as well. I really feel like I am right where I should be :)

I went to Melbourne from Tasmania. I have been to Melbourne many times, but never on a proper weekend- for a city like Melbourne, you should do at least one proper weekend out if you have gone through it as often as I have. So I did. Staying and celebrating life with my friend Charlie, we went out the whole weekend, resulting in very little sleep! Charlie is a good friend from Hawaii. He is from Melbourne originally but used to live in our neighborhood back in Kailua, so it was nice to see an old familiar face!

Return to Tasmania...

To be perfectly honest, I was not that stoked to be returning to Tasmania (Tassie) after my awesome Christmas/New Years Holidays. To be fair, I didn't want to leave awesome Perth for cold Tassie, where the only thing waiting for me was work ;9 But I built my bridge and drug myself over it and went back to work, after all it was only for 3 more weeks until I finished the photography job for good (reason being I only have so long left on my visa and it was time to travel a bit more of Aus before my time here expired). So in late Jan. I found myself returning to Tassie, which only had a week of summer before the ugg boots and sweaters went back on. My time here was short and busy as I was training my replacement/friend/previous co-worker Elise (Lisey). We had time for one more "Adventure Day" together so we went to Wineglass Bay!!

Wineglass Bay has been rated as one of the world's top ten beached. It took us four hours of driving in the rain to get there, then it was night time so we camped out in our truck. It was freezing and uncomfortable. So uncomfortable in fact that half way through the night we moved to the back, inside the 'ice-cream compartment' if you will, lying on the cold metal floor. But this was still better than being cramped up in the front cab. The next morning we awoke and got an early start. It took about an hour of hiking up, over, and down a mountain to get there, but it was AWESOME!! It may be one of the most beautiful beaches in the world, but I would hardly go swimming in there as the water was freeeezzing! And the air... not that much better, especially for it being the end of their summer. All in all, it was a great hike to and from the beach and we had a lovely day! Cheers Lisey to a great Last Adventure Day!

We also decided to get tattoo's together. They are not matching or anything like that. In fact I did not even get anything new, just 2 of mine touched up. Lisey got "Live to Succeed" across her hip.

Its got to be said, I made a really great friend for the rest of my life in Lisey. She was an awesome travel buddy, roommate, and workmate. I haven't said many goodbyes that have made me tear up, since I left home, but saying goodbye to her at the Hobart airport was so sad that we both poured our eyes out and I missed her immediately! However, my time had come to move on and so I did.

More Pictures can be seen at

http://picasaweb.google.com/find.barlow/WineglassBay#