Coffs Harbour & Great Lakes

In Byron Bay we walked around the beach a little at night, then decided we should just find a parking spot we could "camp" in for the night. Turns out, like almost anywhere in Australia, they know there are campervans/backpackers everywhere looking to camp for free and so they're pretty good at making it illegal to just camp in parking spots along the street.

We decided to find a parking spot anyway, a couple streets down from the main drag and beach, and parked in it. Happened to be right by a hostel, so we went in and brushed our teeth there. After watching half of a movie or so on my computer we passed out for the night. Even though we had set our alarm for 6am to try and leave the area before we got a ticket, as soon as we hit snooze on the alarm we forgot about mobilizing quickly. Fifteen minutes later a ranger pulled up.... "You awake mate?" ..."Yup"..."Did you see the sign coming into the city that says its illegal to park and sleep in your vehicle overnight on city streets?"..."No sir, we didn't see anything like that"..."Do you know what you're parked in front of?"..."No" (Even though we had seen it...)..."It's a primary school. Get up now and leave or I'll ticket ya."...."Yes sir, we're out of here". That's the quickest we've woken up so far. We were driving out of town about thirty seconds later.

And about two hours later we pulled up to Coffs Coast, Safety Beach and Woolgoolga Beach.
We went for a walk first, where we found a shipwreck (a ship called Buster), which was buried quite a bit in the sand except for a couple pieces here and there sticking out. It's a protected wreck by the way, not allowed to do anything to it.

I found some really cool pictures of it online like this one that shows the ship a little less covered in sand (or if you're really interested, there are some cool ones here too, scroll down the page a tad and the bottom half of pictures are all of Buster).

The view of Safety Beach walking down from the parking lot.

The beach itself was really fun to take pictures of, lots of random things to see from cool rocks to really clear water.

Skipping stones.

We ate a quick breakfast after walking around, and on our drive out we passed the most perfect kangaroo family. Check them out checking us out.

Up next were the Great Lakes, a couple towns called Forester and Tuncurry. Here we finally actually paid for a night in a caravan park then tried to take full advantage. Went for a swim in their pool (the water was coooold), had a nice long hot shower, plugged in my computer (and ended up watching two and a half movies), and used their kitchen/fridge (got a good steak from a butcher in town). We left the park early the next morning though since we had to get to Sydney by mid-afternoon to return the van.