October Long Weekend

This weekend was a three day weekend thanks to Labour day.  I had to look up the holiday because everyone just refers to it as the October long weekend.  I am still learning the Aussie holidays so this one snuck up on me but I still managed to plan a weekend get away.

A group of 9 of us headed 2.5 hours north of Sydney to Port Stephens, it’s a quiet beach town that happens to have the largest sand dunes in the southern hemisphere and WE SLED DOWN THEM! 

As we were parking the car to meet our tour we spotted CAMEL RIDES!!  How random is this?!?

I wish I had a picture of the vehicle that took us to the sand dune, it was the front of an 18 wheeler with a bus cab or shuttle bus attached to the back.  Due to the amount of rain we drove through large puddles of water and through some rocky terrain to get to the dunes.

We should have known something was up when the tour operator told us we could stay at the dunes as long as we wanted and go up and down as many times as we desired.  All I had in my mind was skiing, and how you can spend the full day going down the slopes.  One critical aspect of skiing was missing…THE LIFTS!

It was HELL getting up this hill!  I thought I had suffered from a heart attack by the time I made it to the top and needed a few minutes to gather myself before actually going down.  I somehow managed to climb this hill THREE TIMES (exceeding my goal by one) and it was so much fun!

And as a bonus, here is some footage of Reggie surfing down the sand dune. 

Surfing the Sand Dune

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And one of my less graceful rides down.

Kyishia Sand Dune

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