Rainbow beach

Today we left 1770 and began our drive back down the Sunshine coast towards Brisbane. The eventful day began with us forgetting to fill the car with Petrol before we left 1770. Another interesting fact about Australia you may want to know: There is not much here. Besides the major cities (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth) there are mainly just bush towns, and just because a town is listed as being a certain amount of km away, does not mean it will have any services. We learned this the hard way as we coasted into a small town called Lowmead on fumes and found that there was absolutely no services, just a saloon and a post drop. Luckily for us, the bar tender at the saloon had a can of petrol he had bought from the next town up that he sold to us and helped siphon into our car. (We were very fortunate to have even made it into the city as it was as we had been driving on empty for many km, with the light on for near 45 km...)

Larry, siphoning petrol into our car

Having learned our lesson about the distance between towns and more importantly petrol stations we decided to keep our car above 1/4 tank for the remainder of the trip to avoid the possibility of running out of fuel again. We'll see how that works out eh?
The main thing we decided to see today was the colored sands of Rainbow beach. We got to Rainbow beach just as the sun was beginning to set and the tides were coming in.

After leaving our mark for posterity and Australia in the sand rocks, we attempted to make it around the rocks before the tide became too high to proceed.

As we had already had a bit of a close call with the petrol situation, we decided not to press our luck and resigned ourselves to not continue any further and retreat to higher ground before the tide got so high that we would not be able to use the stairs...