At the moment we are at my brother’s in Noosaville. We are here to be with Harry while Simon and Kerry take Yasmin to Toowoomba for a tennis tournament which will be a few days of full on tennis, hopefully she will do well in all her matches! Harry doesn’t need babysitting but at 14, he’s just not old enough to be left on his own yet so here we are now, enjoying the beautiful Noosa winter weather.
Since my last blog entry we have been back to Tweed and had a great couple of weeks with Jo, Phil and the girls who were up for the school holidays. We booked into Boyd’s Bay caravan park and that worked well as we could have a few sleep overs with Olivia and Ruby in our van. We had lots of time to enjoy ourselves from the bike riding around the park to swimming in the heated pool, the beach, fish and chips nights, a bus ride, movies and lots of visits to see granny. We were kept pretty busy and enjoyed every moment of it!
After Jo and Phil went back to Coolah we stayed on at the park for another week and caught up with our friends Dave and Carol. Chris used to work with Dave back in his Aussie Post days.
We went out to the Tumbulgum pub and enjoyed a lovely lunch. To top off the day, Carol won the meat tray in the pub raffle. That is the third time running that Chris and I have been there and someone directly before or after us has bought a ticket and won. What are the chances of that? Maybe next time it will be our turn.
As we left Tweed, we took the very pretty, long way around, trip up to Noosa. Instead of the 3 hours straight up we took 8 days and went inland again. We headed to Lowood first and stayed at the show grounds. From there we explored the towns of Lowood, Coominya and Fernvale with surroundings areas. We drove around the huge Wivenhoe dam and Lake Atkinson areas, then the long winding road up to the Mount Glorious lookout.
From Lowood we went to a small town of Toogoolawah and stayed at the show grounds where we watched the sky divers from Ramblers Sky Divers club as they landed in the field just behind us.
From Toogoolawah we explored Esk and again drove across to Somerset dam that we visited a few weeks earlier while at Kilcoy. These little country towns provide good facilities at a great price of $17 power and water, and with friendly locals, what more could we ask for?
Last stop before we got to Noosa was to Kandanga, a small suburb that has a free camp there which had been recommended to us. It’s only about 50 kms up from Noosa, just inland from Gympie. As it’s so close to my brother’s we don’t need to stay there but thought we would go find it on this trip anyway. The free camp (by donation) is a good little spot and very busy with fellow travellers. The locals are friendly and the information centre had a gift shop with local produce and a big book shop underneath with cheap books which is always a bonus as both Chris and I love reading. I came away with 6 books and 2 sweet local pineapples. Chris found a fellow Sharks supporter in Paul a local electrician, who helped him to find a fuse that had blown in our caravan. Turns out that Paul came from the Sutherland Shire like us and his extended family are all still living in the area. It was good chatting with such a nice guy, Thanks again Paul.
Before we leave Noosa we will catch up with another brother and his wife, John and Vicki. They are in Bali at the moment. We had a brief catchup with them before they left but we will see them again when they get back and before we leave on Wednesday morning.
Next stop, back to Banora Point for a couple of days and then we start a Housesit in Robina. This will be our third visit to this house and we will again be enjoying the company of Poppy and Gabby, the Tibetan terriers.