Ocean's House of Pain

Alright, now for a little catch up.

Last week we stopped at a cattle station in the middle of no where and seriously mean NO WHERE. Anyways, we got to practice cracking whips, riding a mechanical bull which proved to be quite painful, shooting clay pigeons and mustering goats. Ben didn't want to do the mustering but I did and lucky me, I got the slowest horse of the lot. He had two speeds, slow and slower.

Here we are almost finished.

Here is the dog. I liked him, Ben didn't.

1770
The next day we headed south to a town called 1770 (yes, a number). Captain cook made his second landing in Australia here that year to repair his ship. They love that guy here. It's a tiny little town of one small street and a surf shop. We took the opportunity to take a surfing lesson. The first day went pretty well as we had small, easy waves and big boards.

This is me paddling into one.

Here is Ben kind of bailing but we don't have many pictures of actually surfing so this will have to do.

A couple days later we both went out for 4 hours when the waves were way bigger. We started around 10:30 and they were slowly building. At the beginning it was no problem but by the end we were just getting annihilated. It was common to see one of us go for a wave then the next moment see the board go flying up in the air and the person disappear in a frothing mass of water. Despite the burnt calves, rashes, chaffing and swallowing gallons of saltwater, it was worth it. We'll defintiely be hitting the beaches as we head south.

This is the beach we were on.

Here's Ben on the lookout. How romantic.

This is the spider of the web I ran into on my way back from the lookout. It was close, he almost landed on me. Lesson: let Ben walk first.

The lookout.