Byron Bay Vacation Day 3, Recaptured in Photos

Sunday was a pretty low-key day for us, for a couple different reasons, and one of the only times I can remember having such an unhurried, unplanned vacation day.  After breakfast we walked from the Byron Bay Beach Resort into town along Belongil Beach.  It was a beautiful, clear and windy day.  In town, we window-shopped for hats (for me, my hat is a little broken and might need to be replaced) and bought katsubushi (bonito flakes) and shichimi togarashi (Japanese seven-spice blend) from the Asian store.  Byron Bay is a bit of a hippie town and they have--you guessed it--a bulk food store. Black beans and everything.  Jealous.

We ate lunch at kinoko, a Japanese restaurant, which has a menu as well as a rotating sushi conveyer. It was my first time at a kaitenzushi place if you can believe it.  We only took one plate from the conveyer, though.  (Would have been a good day to be rich.)  Reid ordered the curry and I ordered udon with vegie tempura.  (I can never resist vegetable tempura.)  The tempura was fritter-style, rather than whole pieces of vegetables, the same way we would make it when we made tempura in Michigan.  The udon was not bad, the tempura was good, and Reid said the curry was pretty tasty.  Best thing about this place: they do not skimp on the pickled ginger. They leave a little pot of pickled ginger on the table. (Yes.)  It was also funny to listen to these guys joke around in Japanese.

We ran some errands in town (picking up the peanut butter at Woolies we forgot to bring from home, bought mahi-mahi fillets for dinner--and yes they are pronounced 'fill-its', but skipped on the prepared foods from the Blue Olive delicatessen (as was our original plan) as the cheapest potato salad or coleslaw was $13 for a small serving, and instead bought some pesto ravioli and olives from Aldi's), went to The Great Northern bottle shop to peruse the craft beer selection (it was pretty hilarious to see Coors in the import section next to Trappistes Rochefort and Chimay) and chat with the owner, and walked back to to the hostel along the beach.  We saw a couple surfers, fishermen and gulls on the beach, and a big pelican bobbing on the waves.  (I have never seen pelicans before Australia and I am still surprised how big they are.)

We had a pretty low-key afternoon and evening: played scrabble on the lawn, watched some football (the end of the re-broadcast of Uraguay v Columbia), and then a movie (Little Miss Sunshine), and then headed to the kitchen to make dinner.  We'd eaten out the last two nights so it was kind of fun to hang out in the bustling kitchen with everyone else (and our breakfasts were earlier than most so it'd been pretty quiet for those meals).  We watched a French girl peel the skin off her mushrooms before using them, which seemed so strange to me.  (Apparently it's a European thing.)  And that... that was pretty much it.  Our last day in Byron, it'll be back to winter on Monday!