Mission Beach

Hey all,

After my stay in Cairns John and I decided to go down to Mission Beach and stay with yet another extremely interesting host. For the balance of our stay Mike would “inform” us about the different UFO sightings he has had and the various conspiracy theories of the government. He would then go on to say how young people don’t know how to think because of the widespread use of the Internet and all that goes along with it. Needless to say, he was quite the character. Mike was born in Virginia and worked in a restaurant until he was 25 then moved to Vietnam, and eventually Australia. He lives on a 30-acre property in which he hopes he can one day turn into a cooking school for the physically handicapped… or a campground. While there most of our work consisted of clearing debris from around his property which were left over from cyclone Yasi. The Cyclone had done a good amount of damage to the area so we were pretty busy for most of the time; although we did have some time for fishing and a bond fire down by the creek. After a week at Mike’s house we were definitely ready to move on so we headed out to the town of mission to stay in a hostel and plan a skydiving trip for the following day. The skydiving was incredible! We planned a jump from 14,000 feet to land right on the beach. As we were flying up we had some great views of Mission and the surrounding area and the few amount of clouds gave us a great perspective of how high we actually were. As the plain got ready for the drop and the hatch opened my instructor had me leaning outside of the plain, and without any notice I realized at one point that I was not sitting on edge anymore. As I fell I reached speeds over 120 mph and which made the 60-second freefall feel like no time at all. Once the shoot was pulled the instructor let me take the controls to try my hand at flying which was really fun. We came back down to earth with a clean and smooth landing and all I wanted was to do it again. But alas, we were already scheduled to make our way back up to Cairns for a weeklong Scuba dive course out on the reef. This trip is so great.

Hope all is well back home I miss you guys,

John