Brisbane

Monday, 12 June 2017

South Bank

Nice cat!

Who, me?

It's coming!!!

Becoming bored with life in the rain, someone decided to take up a new hobby and undertake some science experiments.  His first endeavour was to see how large an area home made apricot jam could cover before the realisation that the jar had been knocked over.  The result: a very large and very sticky area!

Continues overnight heavy rain eased while we packed up and started again after we had been on the road about five minutes.  A lot of the countryside was under water and would only get worse.  It wasn’t long before driving conditions deteriorated rapidly and we were virtually driving in a white-out!  Unfortunately, we had about 100 kms of single lane highway with very few places to pull off or rest areas.  Driving in this conditions with heavy squalls continually passing through was rather hairy, to say the least, as it is not possible to pull off quickly with a caravan in tow, especially when the shoulders are narrow.  Unfortunately, we encountered many IDIOTS (usually driving black or grey cars) who didn’t know who to turn on their headlights or that the accelerator didn’t need to be flat to the floor.  We pulled off into rest areas a number of times to wait for the rain to ease and the normally two and a quarter hour drive took us three and a half hours.

It was a relief to arrive in Brisbane and leave the rain behind, hopefully.  We are staying at the Brisbane Holiday Village for two nights and certainly appreciate the clean slab, with no big trees, no mud, no kangaroo poo and no duck poo!  This is a lovely park, virtually opposite the Westfield Garden City Shopping Centre.  It didn’t take long after settling onto site before we headed to Garden City to collect our new convection oven.  It seemed that half the population of Brisbane also decided to visit the shopping centre this afternoon.

The day started out clear and sunny, but with heavy rain forecast possibly during the afternoon, the risk was too great to hand the washing on the line; the supply of dollars coins is dwindling very fast from the money box!  A bit of retail therapy was the order of the day (no long weekend in Queensland!), so hopefully there wouldn’t be as many people about today.  After wandering about the DFO, we headed to Southbank.  Unfortunately for Doris TomTom, Queensland need to update their maps and give some lane guidance – we ended up in a left turn only lane and had a lovely tour of parts of Brisbane we had never seen before until we were able to get back on track.  We had a short walk before a short, sharp shower sent us hurrying back to the carpark.  Likewise, actually getting to a service station only 600 metres from the caravan park was quite an excursion, owing to traffic patterns.

Late in the afternoon, a beautiful rainbow heralded some rain again.