Root Beer Floats

I started a long journey early Thursday morning to Bryon Bay for the Blues and Roots Festival. It is around 7-8 hours north of Newcastle. I went with an Australian friend of mine, his girlfriend and six other girls. An interesting crew. We stopped a couple places on the way, and mostly drove along the coast which made for some amazing scenery. We arrived at our destination later than expected, and went grocery shopping. It worked very well that $25 in groceries and boxed wine would get me through most of the weekend. We stayed in Balina, a town outside of Byron. We had hoped to be sleeping on the floor of one Kevin's (the Australian) friends house, but unfortunately last minute the plan fell apart. Luckily we were able to snag a cabin/trailer thing on a campground about 20 minutes from the festival.

The festival was a great time. It went from noon to midnight for five days. We only went Friday through Sunday. There was obviously a ton of live music and a lot of people. Luckily, my Australian friend had been to the festival before, and told us that we could sneak in bags of wine. The catch was, we needed to put the bags of wine: in our pants. Having a bag of "goon" (what they call wine), was an interesting way to enter the concert. However, it saved us a lot of money, just like the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches we also brought in. It was kind of ironic since I remember all the times on family vacations I would be mad that my parents would make us sandwiches to bring to places, like Disney World, and here I am at 21 doing the same thing and loving how much money I was saving. Byron Bay, where the festival was, is notorious in Australia because it is one of the true Australian towns that hasn't been "Westernized", meaning there are no McDonalds or Walmarts. It is on the ocean like most of Australia, and the weather was nearly perfect, just under 80 degrees and sunny the whole trip. The nights were the best, as each act seemed to build on the next, and even come out on stage together. I was able to see Don Mclean (the bye bye American pie guy), and numerous Australian bands who were great. One band from Los Angeles, Ozomatli, went as far as to jump into the crowd (a like 15 person band), and play two songs as they walked around in the crowd.

It ended up being a long, dirty five days, but very enjoyable. The drive was beautiful, going from outback to ocean views the whole trip. On the way home we stopped by Nimbim, a notorious hippie town in the mountains. You can google it for more fun information on that. The night after I got back, I headed down to my friend Hank's with Phil, to try and formulate a Spring Break plan. Basically, we we're off track the whole night, swapping stories about each other's trips we had been on. Phil brought up that he wanted a root beer float. It was random, and funny, but I also agreed that I wanted a root beer float. The one thing we really don't do here is eat deserts or anything of that nature. Thats just not in the budget. We decided to go on the two block trek to the grocery store, dodging rain drops on the soggy walk over. When we got to the soda isle, we found no root beer. We asked the woman working and she replied, "what is root beer." We had been in a country for seven weeks that didn't have root beer, and we didn't even realize it. Sometimes I don't know if I should just laugh, or miss home, or maybe a combination of the two. We bought ginger beer and another, what we thought were either root beer or cream soda knock offs, but unfortunately they were the worst two drinks we had ever tried. No root beer floats in Australia.