Fraser Island - Post 1

So we took a little weekend trip. I had looked into going to Fraser Island about month ago, but really didn't plan it until 2 weeks ago (after talking to another lady that I know here in Dalby that went to Fraser with her family over the school holidays). Josh and I left Dalby Thursday afternoon after he got home from work and got changed. We had about a 4 hour drive from Dalby over to Hervey (pronounced Harvey) Bay. He drove for the first 2 hours and we stopped in this one-horse town to switch over and ate at a "restaurant" in gas station. I drove the rest of the way into Hervey Bay.

Thursday night we stayed at a hotel across from the water. It was past 8:00 when we got there and Josh was coming down with a full-on head cold so we went straight to bed. On Friday morning, we had to be at the rental place at 6:30 for a briefing on how to drive in sand and all of the rules. By 7:45 we were in line for the barge and they started loading us on soon afterwards. All of the passengers had to go ahead and get onboard before the cars started loading. It was a single ramp barge so Josh had to back up so that he would be able to drive right off.

I think that Josh was glad to be first so that he didn't have to worry about all the other cars.



And then after a 45-minute boat ride across the bay, we arrived at the island. It was fun and beautiful driving in.



The rental car guy told us that they would be putting us out at Wanggoolba Creek landing but we actually came off at the Kingfisher Bay landing. Luckily they had also given us a map so after a little stressing we were able to figure out where we were going.

And once we got off of the hard roads at Kingfisher Bay, we were ON Fraser Island.



And OH MY GOSH - were we in for a surprise. I think that both Josh and I had thought that the trails would be pretty hard packed easy driving. We weren't quite prepared for how technical the driving was.

This was our road coming out of Kingfisher Bay (you can see a red truck in front of us). When the sand was real high in between the tracks our vehicle would start plowing. It was slow going until Josh got his sand legs.



But we made it to Lake McKenzie on that first day! It was gorgeous.



As soon as we walked up, Josh said 'Well, it's not West Point Lake'. It was so clear.



And the hills around it made it the perfect place to just lay back and enjoy the weather. We probably sat around on the beach for an hour just enjoying the sun and beauty.



I managed to get in the water up to my mid-calves. It was just a little bit cold to be full-on swimming.

Of course that didn't stop the fellow German tourists from stripping down to their speedos and running straight in. They were having a blast.



I persuaded Josh to at least walk a little way in. He didn't even want to come in this far.



As we were leaving someone asked if we were local because they wanted to know what kind of tree was in the picture below. Obviously we didn't know, but we thought that it was an odd enough tree so we took a picture. There were little furballs of nuts or flowers or something all over it.



After we walked back up to the car from the lake, we had a grand feast lunch of PB&J sandwiches and drove on to our next destination. We have plenty more pictures and stories to share (including my attempt at sand driving, Josh's failed attempt at safe driving and the snake that we walked right by).