After my insomniac rambling, we spent the morning hiding the laptop/mixing desk/microphone etc in our secret hiding place, and managed to get on the road by midday. The main pain about getting anywhere from here is the time it takes to really feel like you are finally Going Somewhere New. I mean, it takes half an hour to get to Maryborough, and it’s not until we hit Gympie an hour later that it really feels like we are on our way. Naturally the first bit of car conversation went:

B: So did you pack your pillow?
M: I thought you packed my pillow?
B: Well I can’t do everything. I packed the food, hid the valuables, organised the sheets and blanket. I didn’t even think of your pillow.
M: [pouting] Great. Just great.

I could see he was pondering on driving ten kilometres back home to get his pillow, so I decided silence was the best option. Thankfully by the time we hit Gympie and infused him with coffee, he had recovered his bounce.

We made it to Brisbane on one tank of petrol and had to fill up. Problem. We didn’t have any cash until the next day. With visions of sleeping in the carpark of some trashed out Seven-11, I gingerly rang my bank to get an account balance. Revelation! They had not put through any of my transactions since Christmas! M and I did a salutory victory dance around a supermarket somewhere in Logan, filled the car, bought some treats, and continued on our way.

M was infatiguable. We hit Byron Bay after 8pm (after gaining an hour at the stateline - quite confusing) and went for a wander. It was completely overflowing with people. Every pub was packed to the rafters and had lines of people waiting to get in. Byron Bay has changed a lot - I haven’t been there for about eight years, and it is now a sort of hippy Noosa. Lots of same-y shops selling crappy jewellery, ‘arty’ souvenirs of the area and then the general real estate agents and jeans/surf shops that you see everywhere; the town seems to have become homogenised. Due to the fact it was New Years Eve Eve, there were a surfeit of testosterone fuelled 19 year old males with satellite groups of tricked up befrocked chicky babes, all eyeing each other off while wandering the streets. The people watching potential was huge.

As soon as we got to town it was obvious that we wouldn’t be able to stay anywhere legitmate like a caravan park. We noodled around to one or two, who just laughed at us, pointed at their ‘No Vacancy’ signs and wished us luck. M wanted to head back to Belongil Fields and try to camp there. I attempted to convey that I’d rather be operated on sans anaesthetic in the most tactful way I could. I urged him on out to the other side of town. We saw a sign for a caravan park at broken Head and drove a few kiometres down a dark narrow road through lots of trees. The caravan park was, of course, full - but the carpark wasn’t! We saw a few people in Kombies who were obviously dossing down for the night, and decided to do the same. I figured that the authorities wouldn’t bother singling us out if everyone was doing it - and anyway, all the action was about ten kilometres down the road in Byron.

M opened his single stubby of Stella Artois, and I popped a little ‘piccolo’ bottle of some strangely distasteful strawberry champagne. We toasted our journey and collapsed into fitful sleeps. Zzzzz. Zzzzz.