After a whirlwind first couple of weeks, we found ourselves at a little place called Little Beach. "Heck," I thought, "The place is even named after me!" It's in the middle of a national forest and you have to hike through the bush to get there, so it's pretty deserted. But you can camp and they have a gas barbeque set up! In short, it's paradise.

The wildlife here is incredible. I've seen a platypus (someone told me that 90% of Australians will never see one in the wild), lorikeets, kookaburras who seem indifferent to our presence, a tawny frogmouth who sat on a limb not four feet from our tent, wallabys (on the beach!), wedgetailed eagles, cockatoos (black and sulfur-crested), red-bellied black snakes (who eat the eggs of the poisonous brown snake, so they're good), yellow orb spiders, redback spiders (deadly), wolf spiders, Jack Jumper ants (a huge ant, and scarily intelligent), daddy longlegs spiders (not like ours at home, which are insects), sea urchins, an octopus, and the best part... this beach is inhabited by not one but TWO black bush turkeys! They come out in the evening to forage and squabble over territory. Turkeys are usually so secretive, it's weird to see them casually pecking away at your campsite.



The tawny frogmouth is not an owl, but it's own family of bird. It's so weird it's hard to believe they exist...




In short, it's hard not to just stay here forever. But we've got reservations at a beach house on eight miles of beach, so we're moving on...