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I was sitting in my dorm room at the University of Hawaii one night when I decided to drop out of school and move to Australia. I've had a lifelong infatuation with Australia and I had almost no desire to stay in school for another 2-3 years pursuing a degree that I was not passionate about. I threw a quarter up in the air and it landed on heads. I looked into visas and found a working holiday visa that allows Americans a one-year stay while enabling them to work and travel freely throughout the country. I called my little brother who was just finishing his first semester of college. "Oliver, I'm going to move to Australia, if you want to come with me I'll pay for your visa and plane ticket". I purchased our visas and one-way tickets from Honolulu to Brisbane. We arranged to couch-surf with an American Au-Pair living in Brisbane and get a lay of the land first. After a few days we headed south to the Gold Coast where I had assured him, like so many Aussies had assured me, work would be easy to find. Low and behold we arrived at the very end of summer and nobody was hiring. Still without work we found ourselves with less than $20 and no place to stay. We checked out of our hostel on the Gold Coast and headed south on a hope and a prayer that we would find something. We spent the next 3 nights sleeping on the beach right on the border of Queensland and New South Wales. We used our backpacks as pillows and woke up right before the crack of dawn to get a quick ocean bath before anybody would see us. Miraculously we found woofing (working for accommodation) in a town about an hour south. Our spirits were high when we arrived, we had a place to sleep and food to eat. Nimbin, a town of roughly 1500 people, turned out to be the drug capital of Australia. A week stay was all our sanity would allow us. From Nimbin we hitch-hiked to the next closest town, Byron Bay. We found woofing once again, but this time in a much more sane environment. Our host family was as hospitable and friendly as they come. By day we worked on the yard, digging trenches and planting a garden. By night we would bike into town (3 miles downhill) and get drinks and converse with the locals. The ride back was slightly more interesting. After a night of drinking we found ourselves in the pitch-black dodging wallabies and kangaroos' on winding unfamiliar roads. Soon afterwards we made our separate ways. He left to do farm work in Western and Australia. I went to Sydney.