Oct 17 - Magnetic Island Walking

This morning we checked out of the Foreign Exchange hostel; the nicest place we've stayed at in a while, if not ever. We walked to the closest Subway around (about 2 KM away) for breakfast, then back to the hostel to catch a shuttle to the ferry terminal. Got our tickets that we had pre-purchased as part of our Base hostel Magnetic Island package and hopped on the ferry across to Magnetic. The ferry rode like a dream, which was a nice change from the rocking and rolling on the New Horizon through the Whitsundays. Got off the ferry without an exact idea of where the hostel was (we had it's name and address this time at least) and after asking around we were pointed in a direction and told it's just a ways down that road. A ways turned out to be 2 KM (seems to be a common number in our travels) to Base hostel. The place is quite nice, with an amazing view of the ocean, beachfront, nice pool, etc, although our room looks like a prison cell, but you can't win them all. We tossed the stuff in the barracks and went on a hike to Picnic Bay and checked out the jetty (also known as a dock) with people fishing off of it. We've seen people fishing off piers in lots of places in LA and Australia now and have never seen someone actually catch anything. We had supper included with our package which equated to a burger and fries (with tomato sauce...sort of ketchup) and we got some chips for dessert. The bar had a weak battle of the sexes thing tonight, which we participated in the first round of (throwing a hula hoop over a post) and then were annoyed by for the subsequent rounds with the very loud Aussie announcer. Tomorrow we might rent a mini moke, which look like little dune buggys, and use it to cruise around the island and then do some hikes (because walking is what we need more of). But first we will get up nice and early to watch the Riders game (as long as the illegal internet feed is back on - didn't work last week due to a TSN lawsuit against the site...but hopefully someone else will stream it. Otherwise we'll be listening to it online).