Camping Day 2

Having survived the first night, and also achieved zero sunburn so far, we got ready for breakfast: a fry up of bacon, sausages, mushrooms and eggs.  J volunteered to be cook, which unfortunately meant that I still had to run around organising everything as he didn't know (or didn't look, anyway) where anything was.  (After this, I cooked, it was the same amount of work!!)  The flies were atrocious, a black cloud of annoyance.  They weren't the biting kind, but we still didn't want to end up eating them.  Every plate was carefully covered with paper towel, but still they managed to force their way around the edges. 

 
I think this is actually Night 1... 

When the food arrived, we sat down at the camp table and wondered how on earth we were going to eat without ingesting at least one fly per mouthful.  I'm not sure why we didn't think of it sooner, but I made a mad dash for the tent and was quickly followed by the others.  It was so peaceful and fly-free in there that we decided to have all of the rest of our meals there as well - and cooking was moved to the boot of the SUV.

L and I went for a glorious swim, it was so nice to wash the fried breakfast, sand and charcoal off ourselves, even if only with sea water.  The dogs amused themselves on the sand, and Lily guarded L's shorts with her life.  When we came back up to the car, we found that J was now sitting in the car, on his iPad, with the engine running.  He stayed there for at least an hour before we finally tried to extricate him.  Did you really come camping to sit in the airconditioned car?  Is it really a good idea to run the engine this long?  It was the flies, he complained.  By this time the flies had pretty much cleared, so we finally managed to get him to rejoin the party.

 
A glorious morning for a swim 

We then went to Rainbow Beach, had a look at the surf and decided it was calm enough to hire a stand up paddle board - J wanted to take Tachi out on it.  L and I didn't think that was a good idea, but he was pretty determined.  By the time we had a coffee and hired the board and made our way back down to the beach, the wind had picked up and was stirring up white caps in the sea.  L and I decided to skip paddle boarding but J was still determined.  I got some decent video footage on his phone of Tachi falling off and swimming back to shore as fast as she possibly could! 

 

Too windy to continue 

 
Rainbow Beach yellow and white sand dunes 

Rainbow Beach is apparently named that due to the different coloured sands.  If we had a proper 4WD we could have driven along the beach to check it out, as it was, both L and I forbade J from doing so.  We did walk a good kilometer or so along, and there were definitely patches of bright yellow sand along side pale white sand, but nothing remarkably rainbow-ey.  Maybe Google has some better shots.

 
With a wind-swept Lily

 

L and the puppies on the walk

Being rather hot at this point, we got thickshakes (what Australia calls milkshakes, because milkshakes in Australia are incredibly runny, like milk) and headed back to the camp site.  We skipped lunch, deciding just to snack on doritos and chocolate chip cookies, and I got started on dinner.  Chicken fajitas: as all the individual ingredients were prepared before the trip, everything just got tossed into the pan and cooked up.  They were then eaten with sour cream, salad and salsa.  All sand free and thankfully fly free in the tent. 

The evening was bitterly cold as the afternoon wind didn't die down at sunset like it did the night before.  We managed to get the camp fire lit but it simply meant that our legs were warm and the rest of us were freezing.  

 

Campfire number 2

We eventually gave up and went back to the tent at around 2130.  I wrapped up with three t-shirts, a dress, shorts, socks, and two towels, and managed to get a much better night's sleep than the first night!  Despite Tachi deciding half way through to lick me wet and slobbery right across the face.  Bleugh!

 
J took this of us sleeping !