This weekend was the premiere for me in the premier division of the Queensland Beach Volleyball Tour and I got the honors of playing it with Rose.

According to Google Maps, Elliott Heads (Bundaberg) is 5,5h away from Gold Coast. Google Maps lies here in Australia. You kinda always have to add 20% to the trip, even if it should take traffic into consideration. On Friday arvo, we left at 4:30pm and didn’t arrive until 11:30pm. We were driving up with Karissa and Anna and had a really great car ride up. It is hard to drive in the dark though. It gets so dark here! And the roads are narrow, and speed limits are high, oncoming traffic has strong lights compared to the pitch-blackness all around. Mikael and I switched several times though.

Karissa and Anna were staying at the camping ground and Mikael and I were staying in the backyard of a small cottage behind the camping grounds. Very close to the beach and it was so quiet over there.

We popped the tent up and went straight to sleep after trying to figure out how to get into the house and use the bathroom.

It rained during the night and it was windy, so the straps from the tent hit the tent walls all night which made it hard to sleep, but I still felt rejuvenated when I woke up at 6am. It was still cloudy and we weren’t expecting much of the venue after the organiser, Vball in Paradise the day before had posted that nature had had its toll on the nature reserve where the courts were gonna be put up. But once we got there, we were surprised to find that he really did a great set up! 9 courts out of 10 planned, the sand was definitely rocky and had lots of shells still left in it, but so much had been raked to the sides.

Rose and I played really well together. We did some mistakes, but we always went all in for the points. My defense game was on point and the wind was on our side in every game. We lost our first game in the pool, but still got really good scores. The second game we won, so we ended up 2nd in our pool. Here in Premier division, you don’t go straight to quarter finals unless you win the pool. So the 2nd and 3rd meet in playoffs and the winner goes to QF. As 2nd in our pool, we thought we would be in advantage, but we got a team in the playoffs that should have won their pool, but instead lost. We thought we would win as well, but we didn’t. So that sucked. But that meant that we could leave early on Sunday.

Anna and Karissa made it to the final, but got a ride from their opponents in that game, so Mikael and I could drive home early. Still took 7h, even if Maps said 5.

On Saturday night, we all went to Elliott Heads Bowls Club, which was the place to be in this tiny town on a Saturday night. We had dinner, didn’t stay too long. People voted for Mikael to start playing and there was a limbo competition. On Sunday morning, we went to the beach a quickie and saw whales pretty close to shore. Soon, they will be gone again. What is the point of looking out over the water then?! It was so great driving in the light so we could actually se the environment around us. That made us unfortunately see things we didn’t want to see. We saw a dead roo, echidna and snake. So sad…

Great weekend, long drives, but fun to see something else than Brisbane, Gold Coast and Byron Bay,