Every night is Friday night at Byron

I somehow managed to take 70 photographs yesterday and another 70 today; there must be stuff worth seeing around here. This is more like what we expected from Oz, a bit of heat so I guess it won’t be long before the whinging Poms start complaining that it’s too hot. This will be the furthest south that we go here for the rest of our Australian experience so it will only get hotter from now on. Jeff just showed us some photos of their Australian tour and there are some amazing ones of Jourama falls near Townsville so we must head off there when we get that way; maybe we won’t be doing much jumping off bridges like the guys from Parkway Drive seem to do everywhere they go. We watched their DVD yesterday and you have to see it, I loved it and they made it themselves. It went Gold within two days of being released and it just went platinum two days ago. See their website for tour dates and clips etc. www.myspace.com/parkwaydrive . These guys are going to be huge!

We seemed to walk miles up to the lighthouse and around it taking photos from every conceivable angle before it got too hot in the day. The skies cleared later and we even managed a couple of swims in the South Pacific for our first times. We were only on the beach for about an hour and I still managed to catch the sun on my face and back; maybe we need to buy some sunscreen before we head off even further north. It seems odd to us going north and getting hotter, we have to travel south to catch the rays. We have started to see a lot more wild life now, we even saw a couple of Wallabies in the distance on one walk. There seem to be these bush turkeys everywhere but apparently they don’t make good eating. We spotted the tail end of a snake whilst walking through the bush but couldn’t make out what make it was.

We headed up to Jeff’s new house for a snoop around and really liked it as there are two floors but you come out onto the garden from both. There seem to be guitars in every room, even the toilet so he can practice whatever he is doing. I bet he even practices whilst on a surf board; what a life these guys must be having. They must be the only band in the world that don’t drink, smoke or do drugs and still manage to have so much fun.

As it was Wednesday and I was missing my normal night out with the boys we all decided to head off into town for a taste of Byron Bay. Every night is Friday night in Byron, all the bars were heaving with queues outside almost all of them just to get in. There were street musicians on every corner and most bars had live music, amazing place. We ended up at the railway because they had a cover charge of $45 to get into the Beach hotel; I guess that Parkway Drive must have been on. The railway was fantastic but you had to be patient while waiting to be served as it was so full. It was an actual proper train platform up until about 4 years ago so when people got off the train they had to go through the manic bar to get outside; I bet it was a surprise to the ones that hadn’t been here before.

The night was still young so we carried the party on at home on the terrace where Jeff showed Claire some moves. It took her a while but she eventually got there. We tried to get to bed several times and eventually managed at around 2am when Claire started to practise her new moves with a bit of Karaoke without the music. Rock on Thursday night!