And the beat goes on and on and on and on and on

The Boy is such a good man. I'm not kidding, he's amazing. we drove for HOURS today. not two or three or four or five, but close to 10 hours on the road. According to the Lonely Planet, you can just take the Pacific (misnomer) Highway all the way to Brisbane. So we set out, and the Pacific Hwy is really more like the 7 than the 417. It winds through little towns. The signage is a little spottier too, and we had meant to take some of the brown tourist sign offshoots but missed the first few because we were only given a few hundred meters to make decisions. We even missed Port Stephens where I really wanted to stop because of the year-round dolphins.. by the time we realized it, we were maybe 60 k past. Oh well. We stopped for lunch at a Driver Reviver station (Stop Every Two Hours - this campagin is ALL over the highway. they even give free coffee! I guess road tripping is huge here). Later, we made it a point to go off on the tourist drives and FINALLY found the Pacific Ocean! We (I) played Moo and Neigh Aussie-style (Meu and Nigh) but didn't know what to say when we saw a few camels on the side of the road. We stopped in Port MacQuarie for a walk down one of the beaches and saw some kids flying kites. Flying a kite - that's one of my thirty things. I dipped my finger into the Pacific! It was warm, but really, I wasn't wearing the right shoes, so I only got the tidey bits. I'm not sure I'd ever touched the Pacific before.. I mean, I've been to the west coast of Canada and the states, but I'm just not sure. no wait. Maybe I have. Still. This time, I'm sure. We also went on a short hike and I got bitten by "mozzies"... I took an allergy pill pretty quick but I'm sure we'll need to pick up some bug spray soon. In Coff's Harbour we stopped quickly to take a pic of the Big Banana (they're huge on growing bananas in this area) and finally settled at the Espana Motel in Grafton for the night (aka the only place on the side of the highway that had a vacancy). They had surprisingly amazing food (fish and chips and salad for The Boy and garlic prawns on rice and salad) and we weren't sure if it was the quality of the ingredients that made it so amazing, the fact that we were truly starving, or if the food was just really that good. Tomorrow: more driving.