On my way to a friend’s place for a drink the other Friday night, I took the opportunity of going for a walk around Southbank. I forget how nice it is sometimes!
Wheel of Brisbane
Wheel of Brisbane
Tropical Pools
CBD Beach = perfection
Beautiful City views from Kangaroo Point
Do you remember to take time out to enjoy the city you live in?
The good thing about living and working in a city that is based around the river is that it’s always easy to get there for some fresh air. That’s pretty rare in many cities.
Riverside
Brisbane has a number of walking paths (and cycling paths) that hug the river, so it’s really just a case of finding what’s closest to you and starting the walk.
The views are good too!
Plenty of the paths take you past well known restaurants as well, particularly the Eagle Street Pier precinct. The foodies may be people-watching you as you go past, but there’s no reason you can’t do the same to them 
There’s also markets every Sunday.
Unobstructed views
Or you can just enjoy the walk. Those are the Kookaburra River Queens to the right, a very well known and loved sight by locals.
What makes a city for you? Do you have a favourite walk around the Brisbane river?
When you try. The Easter long weekend is over. I had grand plans for it to be a huge ball of fun. Most of it turned into a giant letdown.
Friday was a local festival, the Festival of the Sails. As you’ll see from *previous post* I love going to this festival each year. Mostly because I love the concept of a sky diving Easter Bunny.
I even used to my sneaky local knowledge to get a free undercover car park for the day!
I guess festivals have gotten a bit less fun in recent years – since we can’t eat a lot of food, that lets out most of the market stalls! Still, it was nice to wander around and I even kind of enjoyed the packed beach full of people.
But the main event, the sky diving Easter bunny …
Didn’t happen.
It was scheduled to take place at 11am. I got a good seat on the steps to the beach at 10.50am. I gave up waiting & left at about 12.15pm, with a bit of sunburn.
No Easter bunny fell from the sky. Never heard an announcement that it was cancelled or delayed. Very disappointing.
Perhaps there was a delay in wind conditions, or because it was high tide & there was little beach to land on? Who knows. But no communication was the part that made me the most annoyed.
There were some good parts:
Inflatable Titanic for kids!
Sand sculptures
Lots of people showed up!
The rest of the weekend was unfortunately similar.
A family breakfast BBQ at the beach where we were all tired from various things the day before. We ate quickly & left.
We tried to enjoy our local area yesterday for some little anniversary treats. Unchecked, screaming toddlers everywhere. At one point we were feeding the ducks & sitting in a small picnic hut. One table. We had all our stuff on it. Nope. This family wanders in, sits down, then allows their toddler to run around screaming & stomping at the ducks. Neither of us could say anything nice or polite to them so we left.
The duck was happy to see us, at least!
Very tame & friendly ducks – you can hand feed them.
In the end we gave up on going out & cooked at home for our anniversary. At least that was nice
The best part of my weekend was the day I dragged my mattress into the living room & camped out in front of the TV. I got to watch movies I hadn’t seen in ages! Perhaps, seeing as I live in a semi-touristy area, I should do that every weekend
How was your Easter long weekend?
There are many travel books full of short stories of humorous things that happen on trips. Especially in hindsight. But remember, funny life stores happen in day-to-day life too, not just when you’re out traveling the world. Being able to experience these things no matter if you’re away from home or not is healthy.
The other day I stopped off on my way home from work to pump my car tyres up, as they felt slightly low. The gas station is usually fairly quiet, but this time there was a guy inflating his tyres & a car waiting. I pulled up close & got out to wait.
The guy finished his tyres, gave the pump to the two women waiting, got in his car and started to pull away. So the two women started to do their tyres.
Only it turns out that:
A) they didn’t know how to inflate tyres, and
B) their tyres were flat.
And I mean flat!!! One tyre was down to 4 PSI!
(In contrast, when it was turn to do my tyres I was only 2 PSI under the recommended level, yet I could feel the difference in my car after I’d pumped them up. I cannot understand how these women were driving this car!)
The guy who had the tyre pump first turned off his car and started to help the women with their tyres. They couldn’t work out how to hold the pump onto the tyre nozzle. Even after repeated instructions. The two women were laughing so much they were ignoring the guy’s instructions.
I wasn’t helping. I was standing there laughing. (In the nicest way possible.)
After they managed to get on tyre inflated, they attempted the other three. The same problem – the tyres were low & they wouldn’t just hold the pump on.
All the laughing was in good humour, but it makes me wonder if that sort of general life skill, ability to handle odd situations or notice changes in your surroundings (like a flat car tyre!) is something that people really miss out on when they don’t travel.
Plenty of blogs tell you to quit your job, sell everything you own and take off around the world for an indefinite period of time.
And while that may work for some people, others genuinely like their jobs, enjoy being near their family or a myriad of other, genuine reasons why that type of travel isn’t going to work for them.
In early 2011 my husband Ben ended up in hospital, very ill. We had no idea why. It turns out he had a late onset of Type 1 diabetes. Needless to say it’s been a tough 12 months so far for us. As lucky as we are to live in a country that has free healthcare for all citizens, it’s not exactly an efficient system and negotiating the bureaucracy involved in accessing treatment to manage diabetes is hard & often stressful work. Combine health bureacracy with the fact that, at the time of Ben’s hospitalisation, I was working in research for a government department and it felt like my life was controlled by bureacratic rules!
And so the beginning of 2012 has already passed by, with some things changed & others still the same.
Health issues & complications have finally ceased to rule our life, as we’ve had a near-complete reversal of Ben’s diganosis. He’s technically considered a Type 2 diabetic, but managed his health so well for the past year that he doesn’t require any medication, he just has to eat well and exercise (as we all should do). So while it’s fantastic to not be living with a permanent illness anymore, the stress of the medical hassles of the past year takes some getting over.
It’s also a bad time in the job market here, like many places around the world. Due to budgets tightening in the types of organizations that my knowledge & experience is in, I’ve been working in any old job just to make ends meet. Hopefully that won’t be the case much longer, as I’m working hard on launching & building my own business, so fingers crossed that will soon ease the financial pressure in our lives.
Running my own business is something that I’ve always wanted to do – I’ve never wanted to work for someone else. This isn’t to say I haven’t learned a lot from working for others, but it’s not my long term plan. I’m also setting my business up in such a way that we can be fairly location-independent, so that we can travel.
Needless to say, with all of this going on in our lives for the past year, travel isn’t something we’ve been able to do. But it also means we’ve started to look for other ways to travel. And you can travel locally a lot!
Our goal is never to be remote working, backpacking, digital nomads. But we do want to have a fairly location-independent business so that we can travel as & when we want to. I haven’t been overseas in more than 5 years right now – it’s scary how time flies! I don’t even have a valid passport, probably for the first time in my life.
But at the same time it’s opened my eyes to the fact that travel is what you make of it, the same as life. I’m not resentful that I’ve been in the same place for many years, but equally speaking, it hasn’t lessened my desire to travel.
I love reading travel blogs, learning about what other people have seen and done at a destination, and thinking about if I want to go there myself.
What’s next for us? Well in terms of travel, we have no set plans, no flights booked. We have lists (long lists!) of places that we would like to go, but right now we’re also pretty happy with domestic travel being a goal – after all, lots of people fly to Australia to explore it for a year, so I think we should be doing the same thing!
Tupperware can make good travel companions. In particular, I’ve found uses for their range of collapsable bowls. Great for leftovers (keeping them fresh until the morning), stopping biscuits or crackers from going stale, and even for washing small clothing, underwear and bandages in.
(See, I actually do use Tupperware this way – to clean bandages!)
Small coins – always try to have small denomination notes and some coins of your destination country. Some travel exchange bureaus or banks may not give coins these days. You can always try connecting with travellers who have just come back from the same place, and buy their “leftover” currency from them.
Like every travel tip, this one may not work, especially these days of airlines charging for every little thing. (How long will it be until they start weighing passengers and charging them based on their own weight!?) However, I’ve found that if you’re traveling with an overweight bag, checking in as early as possible can help to avoid the excess baggage fee (if you’re only a little bit over). The check in crew aren’t so rushed if you’re early and can ‘ignore’ your baggage weight. It also helps if you’ve nice to them and have all your documents in hand, ready for them, to make their job easier.
They also usually prefer that your suitcase is closed… and doesn’t contain a dog
Good Friday is the start of the Brisbane to Gladstone Yacht race. And as I live by the beach, it’s also a festival run by the local council, call the Festival of the Sails.
And to start you off, some sails:
Shots from around the festival & ocean:
And what Festival is complete without a Sky Diving EASTER BUNNY!!!
