Not listening Arsenal's on
To avoid the high priced city parking, we drove around the outskirts of Brisbane's Chinatown and found a little park to leave the car. Nick managed to find a spot in the first road outside the metered zone! We had intended to leave the van with the Wicked garage while they fixed more problems, the horn, the tax and the deck chairs! Unfortunately, they were actually pretty helpful and had fixed all the problems within an hour!
We decided we'd have an easy day (as the past 6 months has been highly stressful!), and took a stroll into the city centre. It was a good half hours walk, but Nick managed to spot Arsenal on in the first pub we walked past; The Pig and Whistle, a traditional English pub! So I was forced to sit and drink beer (proper pints too) in the open air pub on Queen Street for the rest of the afternoon.
In the morning, we discovered the downside of being parked so far out of the city... no toilets. We ended up having to waddle back into town (half an hours walk you remember), both bustling for the toilet. It was a very painful time!
After this we went to the student swimming pool where to our delight we discovered we could sneak in to use the showers for free, and the best bit was they were warm!
Feeling properly clean for a change we walked over the Goodwill Bridge and into the Southbank Parklands and along the Boardwalk. It was a really lovely area with restaurants all along the river, a swimming pool for kids and lots of forest gardens which made a nice change in the middle of the city.
In the West End we went scouting for a curry house as we'd previously decided to throw caution to the wind and treat ourselves! Then wandered all the way back to the van for lunch, where we ended up having to move the van as a traffic warden told us we could only park for 2 hours,(there were no signs) and we'd been there over 24!
Back into the city we went (we've never walked so much) and had a beer in one of the Riverside bars, another really nice area along the banks of the river, before heading to the Roma Street Parklands. Apparently they are the world largest subtropical gardens within a city, and very pretty they are too. Flowers everywhere and water features spurting water out of dalek looking heads! They even have ‘fern gully’, which is a really eerie, misty area you walk through to get out, full of creepy looking birds! I think this is one of the nicest parts of Brisbane, the fact they still have plenty of green even in such a big city.
That evening we had our long-awaited curry, it was not disappointing. We didn’t even have to feel guilty about it as it was such a long walk home we must have worked it off!
Saturday morning was much the same as Friday, we woke busting for the toilet and had to scramble to find a nearby loo. Luckily Nick sniffed out a nearer one, which was also slightly annoying as we could have been using this one the whole time!
After breakfast we went to the Botanical Gardens and strolled round the ponds. We were planning to go to the Queensland Museum as they had a Lifeguards Through the Years, kind of exhibition on that we thought would quite interesting, but we found they’d finished it a few days previous. That and the fact we were knackered after all the walking.
For lunch we bought burgers and used the outside BBQ in the park by the van to cook them on. It had cooled considerably by that time, and we did look a little silly BBQ-ing in the cloudy weather! We were going to go back into town at midnight to see Arsenal v Blackburn back at the Pig and Whistle, but we didn’t make it and ended up asleep by 10pm!
Our last day was a bit of a disaster as it poured it down with rain. We were planning to go to Mount Coot-tha for lovely views of the city, but decided because of the weather we wouldn’t be able to see anything so we decided to miss it out. Instead we drove to Beerwah.