(Note: This is a continuation of my last two journals, from Sydney and the Sunshine Coast. This is my last journal from our vacation.)

We ended our vacation with a bang - lots of adventure and amazing sights! Really it was like 72 hours of straight adventure with a little sleep squeezed in here and there. But it was an amazing finale for our trip.
On Saturday we arrived in Mackay, which from what we had read online seemed to be a bustling city with tons of trips going out to the Great Barrier Reef. So we get to our hostel and are waiting outside and Jenna notes that it looks like hickville. Once we get to our room, we meet one other lady who's sharing our room with us, and she's telling us that Mackay is a mining town with its men way outnumbering its women. Not that there's anything at all wrong with a seemingly hick mining town with lots of guys. (Hey the more guys than girls part especially sounded great! :)) But it just wasn't what we had expected, so it was a little frustrating.
So the next day we're researching, trying to find a place to take us out to the Great Barrier Reef, and we couldn't find anything that would! Once again, we learned that things aren't always as they seem when you see them online.
The lady working at the hostel was wonderful, and she called around for us and helped us set up a trip to Arlie Beach and the Whitsundays Islands, where we could take a day cruise to Knuckle Reef Lagoon on the Great Barrier Reef.

Sunday: We spent the day seeing Mackay's beautiful gardens and eating in a cafe overlooking them, and seeing the Marina where lots of ships were docked.
We also found an incredible bakery (Gumpsy's I think it's called?) where I got a roll, a loaf of sweet bread, and a loaf of pizza bread for $5 - and they all tasted incredible!! I would go back to Mackay just for that bakery. (The good news is, we found out we have a Gumpy's here in Toowoomba!!)
Sunday night we took a bus up to Arlie Beach and stayed in a hostel there. We arrived in the hostel and went up to our room and found the bathroom mirror covered with shaving cream, the floors covered with garbage and the other people's belongings, and two really creepy guys! So we ran out to the workers, and they were really nice and gave us a double room (which was more like a suite, with a double bed, a single bed, a fouton, its own bathroom, a kitchenette, and its own balcony!) for the same price as we would have paid! It was wonderful - I almost cried I was so relieved, and it was so nice to have your own space after staying in hostels so many nights. I think from now on when I travel, I will not be staying in big hostel rooms. I will either stay in a hotel or in a single or double hostel room. I'm just the kind of person that really, really needs her own space.
The rest of the night was great. We met up with some of our friends who had been traveling down from Cairns and were now in Arlie Beach.
The day's adventure continued all night, because at 4am that night the fire alarm went off! I was trying to shake Amanda awake, but she was really groggy and was trying to tell us to leave her there. (In the morning she said told us she had had no idea what was going on; she thought Jenna and I were going for a walk or something.) I was yelling at her, "Amanda, get out of bed now! It's a fire!" Eventually we got her out of the room. But we were fine. Probably someone was smoking in a room or something, I don't know. But it was a great story.

Monday: This must have been the highlight of our entire trip. We took a day cruise to the Great Barrier Reef. We sat on the upper deck most of the trip, basking in the sun while watching the land slowly disappearing and the endless ocean engulfing us. The workers were so friendly, and they served morning tea (which is tea, coffee, and tons of food!), an all-you-can-eat buffet lunch, and afternoon tea (again tea, coffee, and lots of food!). It was great because I LOVE food!!
Again we met 2 American guys, which was really cool! I love meeting people.
When we got out to the reef, we couldn't anchor because it would destroy the reef, so we had to somehow attach the cruise boat to a platoon (I think that's what it's called). The platoon had a big twisty, enclosed water slide that went down into the Pacific Ocean! It was amazing! When you laid back in it and went down it seemed to last forever and you went shooting out into the ocean like a bullet!
We tried on wet suits, just to take pictures. Then we took them off because when I look at postcards and pictures of people snorkelling, I always see them in their bathing suits, not in wetsuits. And I wanted it to be like I could have been on a postcard, you know? I know I'm just so dramatic. Everything has to be like a movie or a postcard or something.
We could have gone scuba diving, but because I have asthma I didn't think I'd be allowed to, so we just went snorkelling. At first I had a hard time getting the feeling for breathing through the tube, but soon enough I got it.
It was amazing! How else can you describe it?
I guess the water was too low for us to swim over the main body of the reef, but we got to swim all around it. It was so beautiful! We must have snorkelled for over an hour. I saw some beautiful, brightly colored fish and corals and some stingrays (thankfully no sharks!). It wasn't as colorful as I expected, but I think that's cuz I was snorkelling and because we were just going around the outside of the reef.
But oh man... when you are there with your ears under water, not hearing anything but the bubbles, and seeing only the underwater life, it's like you've stepped into a wonderland. There was this one part in specific, where part of the reef fell away into this maze-like pathway, and these huge towering walls came up and made a way... it was like they were beckoning you to enter a secret pathway into another world. Oh how I wished I could enter it, but we weren't allowed beyond that point.
Afterwards we went on a tour in a glass-bottomed boat. There was a marine biologist telling us what we were seeing as we passed. We saw a sea turtle on that boat tour as well. It was amazing! I took so many pictures. My camera finally reached its maximum capacity - at roughly 830 pictures.

Our journey home:
After we returned from the three-hour boatride back inland, we began our all-nighter trip home. We hung out in the internet area watching TV, surrounded with all our suitcases, for a few hours, then we dumped our suitcases in our friends' hostel and chilled with them. Finally our bus came at 11:50pm and arrived in Mackay at 2am. Our bus driver dropped us off at a 24 hour service station, where we could stay with all our luggage until morning. So we sat there, eating chips and cookies and fruit salad, and then ordered a great french toast breakfast at 6am (there was a little 24 hour food place there, too). At 6:30 we called a taxi that took us to the Mackay airport, which is really a beautiful airport. Really small and really pretty. We crashed for a couple hours on some couches there. Our plane left at 10:40am, and then we had to wait in the Brisbane airport for an hour and a half until another bus came to take us back to Toowoomba. We got back around 4pm in Toowoomba. Oh I was so tired!

Last night I slept really well and this morning I got to talk with my family on the phone again, which was really nice. I miss them! I can't wait to go home.
But don't get me wrong - I'm loving my time here. In about three weeks, we will be heading up to New Zealand. Don't tell anyone, but we're skipping the last few days of classes to spend five days in New Zealand. We'll be staying with the grandparents of some family friends. I'm really, really excited!! :)

So that was our 10 days of adventure, seemingly a lifetime away from Toowoomba! And now we're back almost a week before classes start, so I have time to work on homework and hopefully finish my papers for the rest of the semester.
It's crazy how fast this semester abroad is going by! We only have 3 weeks of class, then our time in New Zealand, and when we get back it's 2 weeks of exams (and I only have 2 exams, right at the beginning). Then we go home! Wow. It's almost over. That's insane.