Thursday, 15th December 2022

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Fairly early start today, we’d setup google maps on the phone to take us to our first stop for today – Brisbane Koala Bushlands. The initial route showed a 2 hour delay on top of the 2 hour normal drive due to an accident on the M1 (just like being at home!). We changed the settings to avoid motorways and toll roads and it changed the overall time to about 3 hours. This sounded like a much better option, we weren’t in a mad rush and prefer the smaller roads to the motorways anyway.

So off we went, passing through some lovely little towns on the way, with some old buildings and some interesting post boxes. Not sure if we’ve mentioned this before but the people living in the more rural area’s have post boxes at the end of their sometimes very long driveways. In some places, there are groups of several post boxes at the end of a road leading to some more remote houses. There are lots of normal ones but every now and then you get an elaborate one. Today we spotted an old microwave mounted on a post being used as one – genius! Just have to pop the door open and put the post in – job done! You see a lot of beer kegs, we’ve seen a milk churn, we also saw one where they’d sculpted it into a flying dog, or maybe it was a dragon, we couldn’t be sure!

After a mostly pleasant drive, there were some very busy bits which weren’t quite so nice!, we arrived at the Koala Bushlands. We spent a fair amount of the last part of the journey scanning tree’s to see if we could spot one, but no luck.

We parked up and had a bit of lunch before heading off down the 1.4km path where they claim once you get to the boardwalk at the far side of loop you are ‘guaranteed’ to see a snoozing Koala! We were quite excited as we set off, this is it, we can tick another one off of our wildlife in the wild list….. we spotted a Kookaburra so this already adds to our list, just not in the way we’d anticipated!

Before we knew it we had arrived at the boardwalk, our necks were starting to ache from looking up all the time! It was a nice spot, very peaceful except for the insect noises, we scanned all the tree’s……. then looked closer…… NOTHING! Guaranteed it said!

Slightly despondent but not giving up just yet, we made our way round the rest of the loop. We did spot a tree which had claw marks from a Koala climbing it at some point, we saw a couple of these along the way, but no Koala’s. We were still wandering along staring up at the trees when we found ourselves back at the car park.

Giving up, we drove out of the car park, still looking up. When Roy suddenly stopped the car and grabbed his camera. Way, way off across the road and a couple of tree’s back he managed to get a slightly blurry image of a Koala and a bird. There was a bit of commotion going on in the branches and from our google searching apparently Koala’s can get annoyed with birds making too much noise when they’re trying to get their 20 hours of sleep a day, so we suspect it was trying to shoo the bird away.

It's a shame we couldn’t get a clearer view of one, but It’s better than nothing. We have one more possible place to try on our way down to Sydney so fingers crossed we can see one a bit closer up.

We moved on to get to our final destination of the day, and the place we’re spending the next couple of days – the Gold Coast. We had already booked up an apartment in the Grosvenor Beachfront Apartments in Surfers Paradise so we knew exactly where we needed to head. The drive in was really nice, all the high rise buildings are just how you see them on TV. What you don’t get to see so much are the networks of waterways and the stunning, very expensive houses backing onto them with their own personal boat moorings and very expensive looking boats.

We checked in and went to investigate our 4^th floor apartment, it was a little disappointing that we weren’t very high up and were set back a bit down the side of the building. But we were then pleasantly surprised to find our lounge/kitchen/diner area had pretty much a whole wall of full height windows and patio doors with clear views of the beach and the sea. The balcony is a nice size and runs all round the lounge and back to the bedroom, it has plenty of space for a table and 2 chairs which mean we can sit there and watch the people walk by and listen to the waves. It’s perfect.

After bringing our luggage up and putting our few fridge items away in the biggest fridge ever, we went for a stroll to get some shopping for dinner from the local Woolworths. It’s really close, to get there we just had to walk along the front past some bars and head into a shopping centre. Obviously we didn’t make it past the first bar without stopping for a nice cold beer.

It has a lovely holiday feel to this place, the change of pace will be very welcome after the past few days spending hours and hours in the car.

We did manage to get to the shops eventually and came back to our room for dinner while sitting at our dining table overlooking the beach. It’s lovely to people watch, we’ve spotted (and heard) the Rickshaw Cabs travelling along the main road outside lit up with LED strip lights and playing music VERY LOUDLY!! It’s much more comfortable to sit outside as the temperature is so much cooler here, it’s down the 22 degrees now that the sun has gone done.

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Photos

1. Kookaburra
A female Kookaburra in the wild

2. Dragonfly
We've seen many more colourful Dragonfly, but this one posed for a photo

3. Kookaburra
Another , smaller, Kookaburra

4. Koala Marks
These marks are made by a climbing Koala

4. Koala & Bird
We think that beside this bird is a Koala??

5. Gold Coast Skyline
The impressive Gold Coast skyline as we approached

6. Balcony View
The view from our balcony, can sit and listen to the waves breaking