Bus to Brisbane

We had not gone out the night before but somehow, neither Alyssa nor I had slept much at all. We were exhausted but it wasn't that big of a deal since all we had to do was catch a 12:00pm bus back up to Brisbane. We checked out of our rooms by 10:00am had breakfast in the dorm living room. Once we said goodbye to all of our dorm friends, we got on the bus for the 4 hour drive back north. There is a one hour time difference between Byron Bay and Brisbane, so the bus ended up taking an hour longer than I had expected. This wasn't a big deal but it did leave us very hungry by the time we arrived. Unfortunately when I get hungry on a bus, I usually get very motion sick which made the last half of the ride pretty miserable for me.
When we finally arrived, the bus let us off at the Roma St transit center which we had already gone through before. I had booked us a room at "Chill Backpackers" hostel just down the street from the transit center for convenience, so we were able to walk right down to it. We had booked a four bed girls dorm and thankfully, we were the only two in it. Once we had put our bags away, we went off in search of food. There was a mall right across the street from the hostel where we found a cheap, gourmet burger place. Since we were both starving, we went right for this option. Afterwards, we went to the grocery store to pick up our usual breakfast items of yogurt, kiwi, banana and muesli. I kept an eye out for Christmas things that I could buy as a surprise for our Christmas night in Halong Bay, since I wanted something familiar for our foreign holiday. I'd been having a hard time finding things like stockings etc in Australia though- certainly never for a reasonable price!
We headed back to the hostel to get some of our to do list out of the way. Since we were flying to Hanoi, Vietnam the following afternoon, we needed to print out ll of our visa on arrival forms, make sure we knew how to get to where we were staying and speak to our youngest sister, Jessica, about what she was bringing on the trip since she would be meeting us in Hanoi and traveling with us for two weeks. We also did some research into the next leg of our trip in Thailand since our friends Te Tee and Jane were meeting up with us there and we needed to coordinate some of the things we wanted to do there. It was a little stressful to try and get everything done since they charge so much for internet and as a result, we had only purchased it for be of our devices.
At 7:00pm, we took a break because the hostel offered a free sausage sizzle. We never turn down free dinner, even though this was sort of a strange meal. They had grilled some sausages and you were meant to put them between two slices of bread and top them with cheese, onions and sauce. Definitely not my favorite meal but it was edible and nice of them to do it. We stayed up for a few more hours researching before deciding to head to bed since we were exhausted. Of course, the second my head hit the pillow, I was wide awake with thoughts. I was very worried that somehow we would miss our flight the next day (which was silly because it wasn't until 2:00pm) most likely because of the expensive flight Jessica and I missed in Japan a few years ago. Alyssa doesn't have the same urgency about getting to the airport that I do, so I was too nervous to sleep and had to dose myself with a sleeping pill to turn off my mind.

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