Day 185 Today was spent looking for a camera. After a few malls and department stores we found a great deal at the Good Guys. Now we needed a place to test this new camera. Looking at the brochures from yesterday the Orchid garden seemed like a colorful enough place to do so especially since its the biggest plant group with about 25,000 species and hundreds of hybrids added yearly. We went and took a bazillion pics!
We then went on our usual walking tour of the downtown. During this walk as we were passing by one of the 1882 built hotels when we seen a sign for poker. We instantly inquired and the info was to our liking. It is a poker league much like the one we were running back home and they play daily around town here and up the coast in the direction we are heading. We went online to see where the nights event was and after a BBQ at the Bluewater Lagoon we headed over to N. Mackay for our second night of poker since we left Canada! We got to the Suburbs Club well ahead of start time due to a little misunderstanding. While waiting to sign up we put five bucks in one of the pokies and turned it into a modest twenty, to covered our drinks for the game. That was about all the luck either of us got for the entire night. Jenn fared a little better as we got knocked out 12th and 13th respectively. I think I played a total of about 6 hands most out of the blinds, took a small pot preflop with 10s on a raise, had my three 7s crushed by a deuce on the riv for a boat and rivered again when my pocket queens got cracked by an Ace on the riv for a flush chaser I couldn't bet off their A10. All in all though we both had a fun time and it was nice to be able to just play the game.
After a blah rainy overcast day of doing laundry we went to another night of poker. We met Ash an English backpacker at the laundromat and he ended up joining us for the game as his girlfriend was at work. By the way, poker is not going to be a habit that takes over our vacation! The deck was better to us as I came in 6th out of 32 people. Got cards, played well.
This morning was a little foggy but it cleared up very nice and turned really hot after such a cool yesterday. Also this morning nature introduced us to the extremely annoying sand fly! They are fruit fly size little buggers that bite and leave a chicken pock looking mark. And they are out in droves on windless summer morning and evenings. Did I mention that, THEY ARE ANNOYING!! We went for a walk on the beach and were greeted by a very cool experience. As we are walking along it seemed like the sand had a blueish tint to it, and then looked like it started to move. Obviously triggering intrigue we walked closer and it moved more. When we got even closer, we could see groupings of tiny little blue dots forming. Even closer we could see that they were teeny little crabs. Thousands of these teeny little crabs running through the sand till you got really close, then they would burrow themselves in using a corkscrewing motion. When they ran into a puddle of water it sounded like pop fizzing. We were able to get a couple good shots of a few slow ones and one that apparently didn't care we were there and just kept on doing its thing. I looked them up later and found out that they are Light-blue Soldier Crabs that come out when the tide is low. The weather did not hold up for the whole day. By lunch time it was getting overcast and the rain started looming. We were on our way to the local Big W (OZ version of Walmart) to print some pics to send home to great-grandma. Believe it or not paper letters are still being delivered, it might take weeks but it still gets there. Anyway we got side tracked and ventured into Artspace Mackay. We filled our brains with knowledge of local past and present with the help of art, historic journals and pictures. It wasn't the biggest display but it was worth the time. We eventually got our pics printed and are now looking forward to tomorrow when we hope to be heading to the mountains weather permitting of course.