Waterfall Highway

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So we haven't been up to too much since we last spoke. We've spent most of our time wwooking with the lovely Alex and Jane and their three, errr, loud, children Ginger (9), Rory (7) and Milo (3) on the Starlight community near the town of Yandina in Queensland's Gold Coast hinterland.
Most of our time has been spent helping them build the house they've been working on for the last 7 and a half years, meeting members of the community. Everyone has been very great, we were taken on a moon-light walk through the local countryside up to a beautiful view the other day; and i was invited to go for a jam with a few musicians who live here, which was great. I didn't realise how much i was missing playing music with people until i did it again.
We've spent most of our time here helping Alex with earth moving, cooking, a little carpentry, house-hold chores and general house building bits-and-pieces. It's been a really good experience, Alex and Jane have really welcomed us into their family and we've both learned a lot about building a house.
We spent one of our days off traveling around the Glass house Table mountains, which are these beautiful, if very odd obelisks pointing out of the otherwise flat and normal landscape (photo hopefully included). Another day we spent pottering around the strangely twee and fake olde-worlde towns that litter the area drinking tea in The Olde Englishe Tea House (seriously) which was all mock Tudor and large beams.
We were genuinely sorry to leave Alex and Jane's and wished them the best for the 2 or 3 years it was still going to take them to complete the house fully. We headed south to Queensland's capital Brisbane.
We hadn't heard great things about the town ('it's a country town on a large scale'😉 and it's pretty light on tourist attractions, with the exception of the Gallery of Modern Art which is supposed to be the best in the southern hemisphere.
We were staying with a friend I'd made in New Zealand, and never expected to meet again, Rosie and her partner Sam.
Rosie and Sam were great hosts and were more than happy to give us free reign of their house. In the end we didn't spend a lot of time there, instead we saw everything we could of GoMA (amazing!) and the more traditional gallery.
Brisbane is a nice city and although not a tourist magnet is draped elegently around a river that curves its way through it; it has a very healthy cultural life and plenty going on; and to be guided to the best vegetarian restaurants and places to shop by people that know and love city was wonderful.
On the Sunday Alice and I slipped off as it was our first wedding anniversary. We'd pretty much exhausted what there was for tourists to do so we hang out just the two of us and in the evening had a lovely dinner with chocolate pudding and champagne.
The next day we returned to our lives on the road once again, back to living and sleeping in a car. But we had 10 dyas or so to head south to meet Alice's parents in Melbourne so we were in no great rush.
The last few days have been a more or less constant stream of National Parks with all the waterfalls, broadwalks and tramps through sub-tropical forest that implies in this part of the world. We briefly stopped off at famous Byron Bay which started off as a Hippie enclave but has been slowly but consistantly gentrified over the last decade; it was a nice enough town but has lost what once made it special. We also stopped off at the town of Nimbin ('a synonim for Australia's counter culture' according to the guide book). We were offered weed 3 times in about 10 minutes and left pretty quickly, strange place.
We're now on the Waterfall Highway heading towards Melbourne to meet Alice's parents in 10 days or so, stopping off at all the National Parks we can on route, very exciting...

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