August 2, 2015
The start of the long journey
Living in a small rural community is really special. Yesterday, Sunday, we went to our small and very beautiful local church. We were surrounded by friends wishing us well. Thank you all of you who are following this journey along. Tomorrow evening is the meeting of our quilting group and on Wednesday I am going into Auckland to have lunch with my old Dunedin friends. You can see that getting ready for a cycle tour involves socialisation.
We loaded up, the dogs especially Bernie looked very sad and made a determined attempt to come with us. We were in plenty of time and the check in of the bikes went like a dream. Now we just sit and wait for our boarding call drinking coffee and eating sushi. It is only a short four hour flight to Brisbane where we plan to spend the weekend with our daughter Jane and her family.
As usual the weather in Brisbane is absolutely beautiful and we almost wondered why we were going on further as we had an action packed weekend. Weekends with the Walas are always packed with sporting events. Friday night and Sunday morning the boys were both playing soccer and we spent all of Saturday at the pool where Charlotte was swimming in the Brisbane Short Course Championships. No netball however as it clashed with the swimming.
It was great that Mark took the day off work on Friday and we went for about an hour and a half into the hinterland to visit a winery and a lavender farm where we had lunch - the great excitement was that there were little wild kangaroos hopping around in the lavender and the vines. What I particularly enjoyed was looking at the countryside which is so different from New Zealand. Most of our time in Australia has been spent either in Brisbane or visiting the beaches of the Sunshine and Gold Coasts so this was a real treat and it looked exactly like the pictures you see with typical Queensland houses and brown burnt off paddocks.
On the way home from swimming on Saturday we had intended to stop for a hamburger on the way home but Jane took the wrong exit on the motorway and we ended up in "Eat Street" , This is down by the wharf area and consists of lots of shipping containers that have been converted to take out restaurants with an amazing variety of food and drinks there is live music and a really fun atmosphere, we ended up having Japanese Pizzas which have a cabbage base and are particularly yummy. As Jane said ' a navigational error is just the start of an adventure' perhaps we should make this the motto of our trip!
Jacob had to be dropped of a hour early to soccer this morning so we filled up our time going to the Mitchelton Farmers Market. It was every much as good as a European one and had german and french bakeries and the most beautiful fresh produce I have seen. the strawberries, raspberries and mandarines were as good as I have ever tasted.
Now we sit in the departure lounge at the airport with our bikes checked in and the thought of a fourteen and a half hour flight to Dubai followed by a six and a half hour one to Frankfurt
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10 months ago