Meadbh In Australia!

     For those of you who don't know, I came to Australia with one of my best friend's from Stonehill (and my roommate from last year) the one and only, Meadbh Kennedy...also affectionately known as Maze, May, Maeve, Meadbhe, etc.  Due to my lack of blogging motivation, Meadbh has generously offered to be a guest blogger to document the first day of the Middleton's stay in the Gold Coast.  Considering it is still my blog and I don't trust her with complete blogging freedom, my interjections throughout the post  will appear in light italics.  Now, without further a dew, her debut post; take it away Meadbh!

     Well since Kelly is a slacker, this blog is now called “Meadbh in Australia!” Luckily for me, before Kelly became a complete slacker, she wrote down some key notes on The Middleton’s family vacation in Australia and New Zealand. So, I will be attempting to use her little notes and trying to figure out what she is talking about with each of these bullets. Oh please, where would you be without the bullet notes? First bullet is “mini pulls up.” Okay let me think… Oh yeah, so Kelly, Justin and I waited and waited for the Middleton’s to arrive and after what seemed like forever, we saw a HUGE mini van drive right by us once and then twice and finally on the third try the mini came our way. We knew it had to be Kelly’s family with all the beeping and commotion on the street. The Middleton's have arrived!  Without any second thoughts, Justin and I hopped into Minnie with trust that Barry Middleton would get us to our destination safely! Don’t worry, we did get everywhere “safely” but it was definitely an adventure when having to regularly shout out “stay to the left, left, left!!!” Anyways, don’t want to get in trouble for saying anything bad my first day on the job so let me get back to the bullets. It didn’t take long before we made our first stop which is when I decided I could get use to traveling with the Middleton’s. Less than a mile down the road, we stopped at the local 7-11 to stalk up on some drinks and chips for the car ride!!!

     We ended up going to Tamborine rainforest for the day, with hopes to see a waterfall. Going to Tamborine ended up meaning driving around in Minnie through the town trying to find a waterfall so that Kelly would stop complaining about wanting to see one. But really, how cool would that have been?  We finally got out of the car and walked around one of the many rainforest paths. I expected the rainforest to look like something out of Tarzan with many animals, tall trees and vines to swing on. Well… once again I learned not to base Australia off of Disney movies or even all of those crocodile Dundee movies. The first animal we saw in the rainforest was a wild turkey!!! REALLY?? I flew all the way to Australia to see the wild life and the first thing I see in the wild is a turkey? Why did I even leave Massachusetts? Anyways, we saw the fattest and tallest trees ever. This is when I realized how alike Kelly and Kevin are. While Justin and I were taking in the scenes, both Kelly and Kevin are screaming at mom and dad to take MANY pictures of each of them in all these different poses. One on the tree, one under the tree, one climbing the tree and, if we were lucky, one of them together. Lies, I tell you!  It's sentances like these that make the italics necessary!

     We couldn’t find a waterfall, so Kelly decided a sunset would make up for it. Well with our luck, we didn’t see the sunset either. Well, mom and dad (who did not venture down into the rainforest) did, so we at least got to see some photo evidence.  Kelly, Kevin, Justin and I ran down some crazy rainforest path with hopes to get a closer and better look at the sun, but ended up losing sight of the sun and pretty much got lost in this creepy rainforest. Then, we lost Justin, but we made a group decision to keep on going without him because the three of us agreed that looking for him was not as important as seeing the sunset. Luckily, Justin found us and we all made it out alive. Next on the adventure was finding our way home with no GPS, only directions on how to get to Tamborine. As we began to follow the directions backwards, we finally saw our first two wallabies. They were as surprised to see us Americans as we were to see them. We were all screaming in excitement to finally see a wallaby, so good old Barry Middleton decided to pull a fast u-turn so we could see the wallabies once again. Sadly, by the time Minnie was turned around, the wallabies were gone.

    

     The final stop of the night was a trip to the steakhouse for dinner. If you ever go to Australia, an important thing to remember would be: never wait for the waitress to come and take your order because if you do, you will be waiting all night. After waiting for approxamitely 30 minutes for the waitress to ask us what we wanted, she finally decided to tell us that we had to go up to the counter and tell them our order! If that wasn't bad enough, at the end of the meal they told us you cannot take home your leftovers. If I had only know that they weren't trying to be mean, but that the reason behind it was actually a safely precaution, I wouldn't have stolen one of their plates to bring my ribs home.  This brings our stolen restaurant property to one steak knife and one plate.  Next on the list should definately be more forks!  And to think this was only day 1 of the Middleton family adventure plus 2! I had the best time ever being a Middleton for a couple of days and hope I will be invited back on the next family vacation. (Hopefully Mr. and Mrs. Middleton will read this!)

     And a shout out to Grammy, who I also hope will read this! :)