Sunshine Coast and Gold Coast

There are two parts to the coast here on the East Coast of Australia. Up north past Brisbane is the Sunshine coast and South of Brisbane is the Gold coast. The sunshine coast is very quiet and calm. There are beautiful beaches that aren't real crowded and quiet little beach towns. It kind of reminds me of Monterey and Carmel.
The gold coast is the opposite. It is where the party towns are. The Gold coast is filled with kids and there are tons of people everywhere. It reminds me more of San Diego. the beaches are still beautiful and you can find beaches in places that aren't populated, but if you want to go and have fun and be with a lot of people, the gold coast is where you want to be.
We have toured both since we have had a car to borrow. Our first trip was up the Sunshine coast.
We drove up through the glasshouse mountains, which I'm still not really sure what they are, becuase they just look like huge rocks to me, like Half dome but not as pretty as half dome. But we still took the tourist route and went through it. the drive along the Sunshine coast is beautiful. There are trees everywhere and it's so quiet and peaceful. We went up to a small beach town which I will never be able to pronounce because they have the craziest names. It was something like mooloolaba. something crazy...Anyways, we went to a Mexican food place which was pretty nice considering they don't have Mexican's here. We continued up to Noosa and drove around the beaches. It was beautiful. didn't really see much wildlife other than birds but it was still a pretty drive.
The beaches in the Sunshine coast have more jellyfish and other animals you don't want to be in contact with then the gold coast.
A few days ago Meribeth and I did a drive down the Gold Coast to Nimbin. Nimbin is about a 2 hour drive. So we headed off towards Byron Bay first which is a small beach town where tons of backpackers go and stay. It is beautiful and a lot of fun. We stopped off there looked around and got directions to nimbin. As we were driving to Nimbin we stopped off at a small secluded beach and looked around to take pictures. Meribeth had here bathing suit on so she walked through the water to take pictures. She saw something neon blue and bent over to pick it up thinking it was trash and it was a giant blue jellyfish.
It was her turn to run for her life. She screamed and ran so I started to run too because if she's afraid then I'm definitely going to be afraid. So she keeps running and I am yelling what is it what is it. So she yells that it was a big jellyfish and so we start to wonder of course, is it the one that can kill us. so we head back over on the rocks this time and take pictures of it. It was really cool. it was huge and almost glowing in the water. We took a ton of pictures and then a few of the sand crabs while we were at it.
After that we took off toward Nimbin, missed our turn of course, so we had to go the round about way. We finally got to Nimbin, a little late so a lot of it was closed. Nimbin is this crazy small hippy town in the middle of nowhere. It is notorious for marijuana. you can smell it as you walk, they have a hemp bar, which is where you can just go smoke in a bar. All the buildings are painted and there are signs posted everywhere of protesting and things like that. Of course there are a few signs about how much they hate Bush. That can be expected. We walked throught the Nimbin museum,which was just crazy. haha it was definitely a good experience. the place is crazier than humboldt. I can't imagine living in the 60's.
so we decided to go home and man did we go the wrong way again. We ended up on this small road, that was barely paved and there were wooden bridges going over creeks. There was not another person in site. So it took us al ittle longer to get home, we saw peacock, a dead kangaroo on the side of the road, and tons of birds of course. but nothing else too exciting. The jelly fish was definitely the highlight of the day.