She'll be right!

Well, I'm now in Adelaide. Good 'ol Southern Australia. Melbourne was getting kinda crappy anyways. I ended up moving to a different hostel there, in St. Kilda. That's a suburb south from the city centre on the water. This had to be the dirtiest hostel I've been in yet. The room had an odd smell to it because some guy from Alaska was using the room as his personal garbage dump. Ugh...

So on Tuesday I took a tour from Melbourne to Adelaide along the Great Ocean Road. My first time going on a tour bus... it was actually a lot of fun. Most of the time on the tour I was hanging out with a few Scots and a few Irish guys. Needless to say... the nights were the best part of the trip. Although waking up the next day was usually an adventure.

Our tour guide's name (no kidding) was Steve. He was absolutely hilarious... he was so stereotypically Australian we were all laughing just from hearing him talk. To him, everything was "sensational."

So a few pictures. I've lost my download cable for my camera so pictures are gonna be harder to post all the time. And a new one is forty bucks... just for a stupid cable. gah!







In order: a lizard at the Melbourne Zoo, the Twelve Apostles along the Great Ocean Road, and some koalas. Heh, so cute.

Lotsa cool stuff to see. Heh, we made a lot of picture stops along the Great Ocean Road, and looking back through my pictures they all look the same. It was all so pretty that it was hard not to take another picture. Ah well.

Hrm. Last night here was an interesting one. Me, the Irish guys and a couple English girls went out on the town. Not the best night for self-control. I ended up spending an absolutely disgusting amount of money on booze, so I've decided to take from now until the end of June off. No more alcohol for a month... should be healthier at least. Its a good thing this hostel I'm at here is really quiet... I slept in until after 3 in the afternoon and have had a good day of lying around feeling sorry for myself :)

Ah well. I've booked a train ride out to Perth on Thursday. So I've got a few more days to hang around town here. Tomorrow I'm going to hire a bike for the day from the hostel here and tour around, and hopefully later this week I'll be able to get to a hockey game. (there's an arena pretty close by... woohoo!)

Well, I'm off to nurse my hangover some more. Sigh...

-Brad

Beertopia!

In an effort to make up for the lack of posts the last couple weeks I'll do one while I'm drunk. Woohoo!

Anyways, I decided to skip the trip to Hobart and head back up to Melbourne. Since my plan was to go drink in Hobart, I don't think I've really missed anything by skipping that trip. Whew... its been a good couple days here. The hostel I'm staying at had a pub crawl last night... excellent time. I met a couple Canadians from Calgary, and they were both mechanical engineers like me. So it was a good night, that goes without saying. I'm a little disappointed they didn't keep up with me, but then again I've been drinking with an Irish guy the last week so they had their work cut out for them.

So tonight we went out to the Melbourne Exhibition Centre. They had a thing going on called Beertopia. 400 beers from around the world. Ohhh yeah. No Canadian beers, I was kinda disappointed... I'd heard that Keiths was gonna show up there but I didn't see them there. Ah well. I kinda hung out at the Belgian beer tent anyways (lotsa free Hoegaarden. Yes.) Then another pub afterwards where I showed that I still had coordination and whooped them at pool. haha

Its after 3:00 in the morning at the hostel here, and I'm about ready to fall asleep at the computer here, so I might have to cut this short. No pictures or anything this time, but those guys from Calgary are going to email me some of the pictures they took tonight. I'll make up for it next time. Whew. Me so tired.

Well, g'night all.

-Brad

Step step Plunge! Tree, stomp, kick kick, repeat.

Yeah, that sums up my life for the last few weeks. The world of tree planting isn't as glamorous as I thought it might be. Turns out its hard work! haha. I ended up planting over 23000 trees in the last few weeks.

I'm all done now though. In three weeks I made close to two thousand bucks, so that should do me for a month or so... hopefully. I don't think I could've taken much more of that job... we were in a little town up in the mountains, pretty close to where I finished the Overland Track. There was nothing there but a bunch of trailers and a pub. And a lotta drunken locals... haha

It was good money though. I was making around $20-25 an hour, which is interestingly enough more than I made at my last job. The work is better too :) My best day was last Tuesday; I made $225 in seven hours work. Over $30 an hour... not too bad for a crappy job like that. The accommodation wasn't that bad either. I had a single room which was alright, and the pub meals were excellent. I now have a very healthy addiction to banana splits :)

Hrm. Sorry about the lack of posts the last couple weeks. I've received numerous emails (well, none) from all my fanatical readers telling me to post more often, so I'll make sure I get on that. I've got a couple pictures at least!

Here's a shot of a field where I was working this last week, and one of a tree I planted.





And one more of Joe giving me the finger. Joe has kinda been my partner in crime (well, not really crime, just a lotta drinking) the last couple weeks. The French-Canadian guy didn't end up working there, but I'd hung out with Joe at the hostel before we started working so we knew each other already.



So, right now I'm just relaxing for a couple more days in Launceston then heading to Hobart for a final Tassie bash. Me and Joe left the crappy hostel we'd been staying at, and are at Irish Murphy's in Launceston. Staying above the pub in a hostel there... that makes for trouble. Tonight is gonna be a good night. heh. They have live music every night, and last night the band played a few Zeppelin songs. I was happy. :)

By next weekend I'll probably fly out of Hobart and head back to the mainland to Melbourne. From there, to Adelaide and across to the West coast to Perth. (break out your maps...haha) Joe there is from Western Australia, so he's told me about a few good places to go already. Plus apparently he has a sister who likes to feed people :)

Well, I'm off to do some shirt shopping. You get surprisingly dirty planting trees, so I'm down a couple shirts that I had to throw out. Ah well.

-Brad