Friday 22nd and Saturday 23rd June - The Return to Oz

Friday 22^nd June – off to the Gold Coast!

As Simon had taken today off for our trip, it was the perfect opportunity to book a Bank appointment for me to be added to the joint account now that I’ve got my Visa (have I already mentioned that?!). So, a bit of admin in Pukekohe in the morning was followed by finishing our packing before driving up to Auckland airport.

We’d already been notified by Jetstar that our flight was due to be delayed by about an hour, but that kept creeping up until we were late by a whole two hours. I managed to notify our car hire company on the Gold Coast to stop us losing our chosen car and we wiled away the time playing cards and watching World Cup matches being replayed on screen in a bar.

Thanks to the time difference we got those two hours back on the flight, but it still meant that we arrived at our apartment at 9pm instead of 7pm as we’d hoped.  Plus, to our body clocks it felt like 11pm and we were too knackered to go out.

Saturday 23^rd June – Drinking day in Byron Bay

Si popped out for brekkie from a local café, bringing us back some pastries and coffee. We then wandered the very short distance into town to get some essentials for the apartment before we could freshen up and start the day for real with some browsing in the local surfie shops.

Good place for a lunchtime beer

We found a suitable seat in the sunshine at a seafront bar for a lunchtime snack and something to drink. It was about 1230pm by this time. 

We then caught the courtesy bus to Byron Bay Brewery for their FREE 2pm tour. It was hilarious. Like us, everyone was there for the free beer, which was generously splashed about from continually appearing jugs. The guy taking the tour just seemed to ramble. Firstly, about the history of the brewery, which was built on land that used to be a piggery, then onto famous bands that had played in the venue (The Ramones and the Rolling Stones, so worth a mention!). Then it was evident that maybe he’d had enough beer – the conversation disintegrated into how to make your own homebrew – a strange tactic on a brewery tour when you’d expect they’d be trying to convince you to buy lots of their patiently crafted produce?! 

 

You'd need a big house to fit this amount of brewing equipment for your homebrew!

It was a great beer garden kind of a day!

The tour kind of fizzled out after about an hour and people started leaving in dribs and drabs. We had struck up conversation with an American girl called Sarah, who was originally from Connecticut but has been living in China for six years before moving to Brisbane recently for teacher training.  As she was travelling alone and was only in Byron for tonight, we ended up inviting her back into town with us.   

We were already tipsy, so we continued drinking to stay ‘in the zone’, calling in first at the Great Northern to drink in the sunset on the balcony, before heading over the road to the Sticky Wicket sports bar to catch the rugby.  As a bonus, it was happy hour with cheap drinks and $1 wings between 5-7pm, so we made the most of that! 

Having enjoyed the All Blacks destroying France in the third test it would have been rude to leave when the Wallabies were playing next.  They had a close tie with Ireland but were eventually beaten. By this time, we had moved venue to the Railway where there was a band playing, but we were so into watching the rugby that we only heard them in the background.  The sport and the music finished by 10pm and we felt that a solid nine and a half-hour session was enough for us. Plus, Sarah had a 6am bus to catch the next morning, so we bid our farewells and headed home, a little the worse for wear.