In the morning we went into the town centre and had some nice raisin toast and coffe for breakfast. There's not much to the centre of Coff's Harbour (incidentally where Russell Crowe hails from I believe) so we headed on up the coast again. After seeing a few amusing sights on the road (a sign for a cafe selling macadamias with the tagline "Hmmm... nice hot nuts in your mouth" and a car transporter full of speedboats) we stopped at a nice little village called Ulmarra. Ulmarra has a nice main street that looks much as it did 70 years ago and is very reminiscent of an American frontier town. Another stop further down the road found us at the 'Little Italy' rest area - actually a cafe and Italian heritage museum playing dodgy, loud Italian music. Here, whilst going to the toilet, I also saw my first St Andrew's Cross spider (this is not my picture):
I don't think that they are dangerous but I decided to leave it alone all the same. More strange sights on the way to our next stop Ballina (a hotel openly advertising free porn to all rooms!) where we stopped at a really nice cafe called Shelly's on the Beach for lunch. Good food and an excellent view across the bay. We drove past one of the best hangliding sites around, apparently, just outside of a place called Lennox Head on the scenic route to Byron Bay. At Byron we went up to the lighthouse where the most easterly point on the Australian mainland can be found. It's quite high up and gives an impressive panorama with the chance of seeing migrating whales and dolphins at the right time of year. We did see a few dolphins, but unfortunately no whales.
We reached our final destination for the evening, Surfers' Paradise, at about 18:00. Having not booked anywhere to stay here, we started looking around the motels for something not too pricey but it seems that the motels around there close at 17:00 unless you have a booking (in which case the keys are left in a remotely opened box!) We decided to blow it and opted for a nice looking tower block hotel called Legends, but as it turned out it was only AUD110 (less than £50) anyway. Very good value it was too. Surfers' is pretty tacky, but quite lively at night and so we managed to find a nice place to eat and then retired to the room having failed to locate a bottle of wine to drink (the local bottleshop was closed for stock taking). Ho hum.