The month of September finds us trying new things. We more or less have settled into our jobs and we're now living comfortably in an apartment. We look forward to the weekends and use them mostly to visit the sand islands that Queensland has to offer.

We took a two-hour drive to Noosa for the second weekend in September. Noosa is one of the nicer tourist traps around Brisbane. Apparently it has a lot of stores where someone could part with quite a bit of their hard-earned money. Lucky for us, we didn't find too many of them. Todd certainly thought that 3 pairs of pants were enough for anybody. Why would we want to buy more?

The drive to Noosa from Brisbane is largely uneventful. The Australia Zoo (which we still haven't visited) is about the only thing to see on the way. Steve Irwin got his start there and still visits regularly to amuse the tourists and to play with the crocs on holidays. The other thing to see is the Big Pineapple. It's too big to eat, but we stopped for a bite anyway.

We spent the night in Noosa and ate a huge amount of seafood Saturday night. By the way, none of us recommend the bay bug (it's a small Australian version of the lobster). Stick with the real thing.

Next morning we took a drive to the Great Sandy National Park. The southern section of this park is Australia's version of the Everglades. Course its not swampy or anything, but there is a nice river we canoed down. The boat ride took us around 3 hours all together. That's a lot further than we had canoed before and a lot further than we wanted to go. On the way though we saw a lot of eagles. That was pretty cool.

The third weekend of September we rented a 4WD Mitsubishi Pajero and headed to the Moreton Island ferry Friday afternoon. Although the ferry dock isn't too far from our apartment, the road is pretty desolate to drive there. We almost got lost on the way, but managed to get there just the same. We learned the Aussie way of backing up while driving onto the ferry. Screams of "right hand down!", "left hand down!" instead of "turn left" or "turn right" made us pretty confused. Todd was ready to make the screaming guy back it up!

Moreton Island has not one paved road on it. The fact that most of the roads have a foot of sand on them makes it pretty treacherous driving. Much of Moreton is covered with trees and swamp. The next picture is a good example of a typical road.

We camped over night on the island, right on the beach. The nice crashing of the waves all night lulled us to sleep, only to be rudely interrupted by the screams of 3 Kookaburras at 4:30 AM. The rocks and sticks we threw at them didn't deter those danged birds until we pretty much knocked them out of the tree. They flew off to taunt us from a nearby tree, thankfully not loud enough to keep us awake any longer. Freakin' birds.

We visited the desert and managed to get one sand boarding run down the mountain. Bryon drove through the forest to what read "Desert" on the weak map of Moreton that we had. We didn't know what to expect, but were surprised when the road suddenly ended with dunes all around. Off in the distance, we saw a large bus that was spewing people from its front door. There must have been 30 or 40 people milling around by the time the bus emptied itself. Each person was given a 4'x2' masonite board and a little wax and instructed to climb the dune. This was no small feat. For each step upward, you slide a half step backwards.

Meanwhile, we're sitting over by the car, a quarter mile or so from the bus. "How likely is it that they'll let us borrow a board so we can slide down the hill . . . is it worth walking all the way over?" we all wondered. In the end, we made the trek to the bus and pleaded with the bus driver who, like most people who work for resorts, didn't want to let some campers onto his bandwagon. He finally let us go down one time. We probably hit speeds in excess of 40 mph, sliding for what seemed like forever. Kam hit a big sand-drift and was consumed by a cloud. Eventually, she got all the sand out of her ears and hair.

Let us take this opportunity to say that we really miss Mexican food. What we (or at least Todd) wouldn?t do for just a Taco Bell or Del Taco burrito. If anybody reads this, please go have a taco for us!

Back to the present . . . here's a pic right on the beach. Evidently there are a lot of starfish in the ocean right off shore. The tidal effects are pretty significant. At low tide you'll find a ton of starfish way inland getting a little starfish tan. In fact, some of them were so far from the water that we were sure somebody carried them there.

OK, before we completely leave the Moreton Island episode, Kam wants to make sure that everyone knows that Todd was sick Saturday night. He took in a little too much seawater and invented a new sport -- crawling and vomiting. Surely Kam felt bad though when he dragged himself out of the tent as fast as he could so that he could throw up away from the tent.

Apparently we didn't have enough of sand islands at Moreton. The next weekend found us at the biggest sand island in the world, Fraser Island. This one is a bit farther from Brisbane. We drove three and a half hours north to Hervey Bay Saturday morning to catch the vehicle ferry. A 45 minute boat ride dropped us at Kingfisher Bay on the island. Coincidentally, we spent Saturday and Sunday nights at the Kingfisher Bay resort right where the boat dropped us off.

Fraser is a pretty big island. The eastern coast of the island is one long beach unbroken by human construction. They call it the 75-mile beach for obvious reasons. But to call the island nothing but a big hunk of sand doesn't do the landscape justice. Hundreds of types of ferns and trees grow everywhere on the island. Driving along the sandy roads the crisscross the island is like driving through the jungle. Quite a bit of the jungle reached out to scratch the side of the car as we passed, in fact.

The Penrods were there on the island with us too. Shortly after arriving and unloading in our villa, we headed out in two cars to nearby Lake Mackenzie. It's a freshwater lake in the middle of the island. As you can see, we were having a great time on a beautiful beach. We had a little trouble keeping up with Jeff, who drove in the lead. He drives more or less like a man possessed.

The next morning we got up bright an earlier to go whale watching. The bay on the eastern side of Fraser is a stopping off point for the humpback whales as the travel south for the Antarctic to spend the summer. We spent the entire morning with two whales that were really showing off, jumping out of the water every minute or so. It was quite a display, every bit as good as what we had seen in Tonga.

Back on the road again after a stunning morning of watching whales throw themselves out of the water, we drove a ways up 75-mile beach. The previous picture is of a formation right along the beach, called the Pinnacles. One more stop off at the dunes at Lake Warby and we gave sand boarding another try, this time with masonite boards we bought at Australia's version of Home Depot before leaving the mainland. Boarding didn't work as well here as it had at Moreton. The dunes weren't as steep and the sand wasn't as hard-backed.