Day 53-59 Christmas
Arrived in Brisbane at about 4pm on the 23rd December, only took a few hours from Noosa on the greyhound. We are staying with Lauren's auntie and her 2 girls in a place called Mount Glorious (about 50 minutes from the centre of Brisbane). Living up the mountain means there are limited amenities such as shops, so before heading up the mountain we stopped in the local town of Samford to get some last minute essentials (beer & wine :) ). Their house is lovely and probably took about 20 minutes to get to from Samford. Its situated quite far up the mountain in the middle of the rain forest, because its in the rain forest and so far up the mountain the temperature is generally about 5 degrees less than the centre of Brisbane. Queensland is currently experiencing is wettest summer its had in years so although everyone at home thinks we were enjoying a hot Christmas on the beach, you couldn't have been more wrong. We had a great Christmas day however, Lauren's Cousin is only 6 so was extra excited on Christmas eve. We went out for dinner that night to try and tire her out and ended up having a late night so woke up in pretty good time on Christmas morning. All the lovely presents were open by 9.30 am and we had a delish Christmas morning brekky- Croissants, fruit and panettone cake. Later on that morning we went into the rain forest to pick Banana leaves for the Salmon we were having for lunch. Amazingly the rain stopped while we picked the leaves :) We spent the rest of the day eating, playing games and watching TV so it was a traditional Christmas we think you'd all agree, just that we were all the way on the other side of the world and 10 hours ahead. The only exception to the traditional English Christmas was that we did try and swim in the rock pools a bit further down the mountain.. Luckily or unluckily (we're not sure) they were overflowing due to the amount of rain that had fell :) so we couldn't swim and just had a little paddle instead.

While in Brisbane we visited the city on a couple of occasions. We went to the cinema, the museum, shopped in the sales and went swimming at southbank lagoon.

We left Brisbane on December 29th and headed straight to Sydney on our last greyhound bus. We had originally planned to leave Brisbane slightly earlier and make a couple of stops along the gold coast on the way down to Sydney, but due to floods in that part of the country the buses were not running for a couple of days. Thankfully the buses started running again on the 29th or we would have been unable to reach Sydney in time for new year.