An exciting day today - the Director for Infrastructure had offered to give me a tour of all the Games Venues to help bring it all to life! The Games will take place predominantly on the Gold Coast. Some venues will just be overlaid by Goldoc, some require improvements and some are brand new venues. Some will be used for the games, others will be used for pre games training & to host complementary events We started at the Coomera stadium - a huge box like v...

I was up early today and off to the Gold Coast for some whale watching with the girls from Girlcrew. We arrived around 11.30. It was a beautiful sunny day. We were a bit early so we went for a drink and bite to eat at one of the bars around the harbour, passing Pelicans and so many fishes We boarded the boat around 1 and set sail at 1.30. The views of the beaches were lovely. We were around 3 miles out to sea when the crew spotted a mother whale we a calf whi...

Today was a public holiday in Brisbane. Each city gets a different day off this week to go to the Ekka, but since I'd already been I decided to organise a Roadtrip to the Sunshine Coast with the girls I'd met on Saturday through girlcrew Our first stop was Eumundi markets, a large village market selling street food, jewellery, arts & crafts. After a mooch around we headed off to Noosa. Noosa is a small seaside town, much smaller than the towns on the Gold...

I'd signed up to 2 meet ups today, the first was a picnic in new farm park, the second was seeing a band at the story bridge hotel It was a gorgeous day so I decided to walk the 2 miles or so round to new farm, stopping at Coles to buy carrots, humous, snacks etc. There was around 20 people there - none of whom I'd met before, many of whom were Brits! One of them even used to run a pub round the corner from my Marylebone office! It was soon 2pm and time to head...

Today was the Ekka festival. When I bought a ticket I wasn't actually sure what it was, but apparently it's THE event of the Brisbane social calendar! Turns out its a agricultural festival though also includes art, food, a fun fair & something called show bags - as well as firemen selling charity calendars! We saw cows (real and plastic) , horses, cowboys, sheep, wood cutters, pigs, dogs and cats. We also had a strawberry ice cream (apparently that's tradit...