30th birthday part 4: BRISBANE to SYDNEY
Sun, Sep. 20th, 2015 07:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annarti
So when I said 'tomorrow' I meant tomorrow-within-the-holiday. Friday night was the footy (we lost =( Badly =( No more finals campaign for the Crows, but I'm so proud of them for this year in general. 2016 looks good) and then yesterday I went with Mum and Dad to McLaren Vale to taste and buy wine (delightful! Perfect weather, great wine, spent much).
So we left off at Byron Bay, after which we headed up across the border into Queensland. We crossed the border with CONTRABAND because the border was just a metal sign along the by that time 6-lane Pacific Highway and there was nowhere to drop off the said contraband. It was a banana. Taking fruit and veg across borders is not a thing you're allowed to do in Australia, mostly because of fruit fly, which is always made a Big Deal of going through airports but apparently not for driving between Queensland and NSW. We figured this made sense, because the Gold Coast technically straddles the border, so people live, for example, in NSW and work in Queensland. So they'd be taking fruit across the border for lunch every day and that'd just be jolly impractical. Because, y'know, having a different time zone for both halves of the city over summer makes so much sense.
BRIS VEGAS, BABY. This was the view from the top of... that hill with a really weird name. Mount Coot-Tha, thanks Google. Shuddup my Brisbane geography is minimal at best. So as we were driving up over one of the many bridges that cross the Brisbane River, just as I was thinking WOW TALL BUILDINGS, Cassie just came out with, 'It's so small' because of course she's from Sydney and I'm from little old Adelaide, but we were both foreigners in a foreign land by this point. On the far right there you'll see the Wheel of Brisbane, which I keep calling the Brisbane Eye because srsly they missed an opportunity there. We went on that later on because tourists.
Also it weirds me out that you can barely see the sea. Every Australian city is pretty much built on the seafront, so to have one that's river-centric is weird. I mean, it's there, but it looks like it's a pretty solid drive from the CBD.
And zoomed out a bit. Brisbane River on the right, the one you would have heard about flooding a few years ago, because Brisbane is built on a floodplain. Weird Queenslanders.
Panorama again! We had lunch in the café on the left there, along with Cassie's grandpa, who kindly treated us to lunch :D
I didn't notice that other person's hand in my photo. Whoops =/
So we got to our hotel, right nearby Southbank, which is the tourism hub of Brissy, and headed out to enjoy Saturday night in Bris Vegas. So yes, this is Southbank. This is pretty much what you get for, idk, kilometre or two? Too early in the season yet for the bougainvillea to be in flower yet, but it was all so beautiful and tropical. You wouldn't think half of it had been washed away a few years ago.
Continuing along Southbank to this lawn surrounded by rainforest.
Little bit of bougainvillea, just starting to come out. Imagine all of that covered in purple flowers 8D
Between this photo and the last we just happened upon a market! Just a little one, but we had fun wandering through that and hoping for food stalls, but all they had was donuts and corn on the cob, no actual dinner fare. I'm sure I must have bought something there but can't for the life of me remember what it was now. Maybe I'm getting confused with Cassie buying things, idk. Anyway.
Brisbane CBD at night across the river.
Little rainforest walk we found :D This would've been so gorgeous in daylight. Still quite lovely at night, though.
And again.
SOMEHOW this Nepalese pagoda survived the floods. I guess the water didn't come up this high? It was incredible, so much detailing and gold.
From the Wheel of Brisbane, which for some reason I didn't get a photo of itself. Whoops.
Convention Centre to the left. When we booked into our hotel room the girl on checkin desk asked us excitedly if we were going to Sexpo. Which was a thing that was on at the Convention Centre that weekend. We did not XD
Finally we gave up looking for food and just Googled somewhere with good reviews, ending up with a Japanese restaurant. This wasn't it. The one we had looked up was closed despite its opening hours clearly stating it should have been open. Still, the street seemed to be a good-eats-for-dinner type street so we wandered along looking for something interesting and came across another Japanese restaurant that hadn't come up in our earlier searches but which looked awesome and had lots of people in it. It was indeed awesome. We were up at the counter (see Cassie there for reference X3), with a screen to order from which felt both typically cool Japanese futuristic and also a bit impersonal, but we also got a waitress anyway. So we could see the guys cooking and had fun picking which meals were ours X3 We got about 6-ish reasonably small things and they were all so amazing X9 Also discovered the place had only been open since March, so they didn't yet have a web presence, but they also said they're opening another restaurant in Adelaide! I anticipate this muchly.
From the outside. Such a pretty little spot! Also, these two photos are a lie; they're from the night after. Because we went there twice, because it was SO GOOD and we couldn't fit in the sukiyaki and had to come back for that X3 Also it was close to the hotel.
After that we went back to the hotel where I caught the second half of the Crows v Brisbane 8D Which was aired on a secondary station and certainly only got aired at all because Brisbane was involved. Queensland doesn't care about AFL. Cassie's first comment was that they had really tiny shorts. Yes. Yes, they do. Then she spent the rest of the match reading and laughing at me >>
Day 2 in Brisbane was pretty typical city stuff. We slept in because for the first time we didn't have a chuck out time, then just went to Westfield to go shopping for a few basics and lunch, bummed around until 4pm when the centre closed (...wtf Brisbane what to you people DO after 4pm on a Sunday?) then went back to the hotel room until dinner time. It was basically a wind-down day, so no exciting photos except the above two at the same place as on Saturday XD Monday we were back on the road, hightailing it back to Sydney.
Back in Byron! Because I realised I hadn't actually taken a photo of the town yet. It's a very convenient lunch stop, being 2-ish hours from Brisbane after chuck out time at 10am. We were considering the place we'd been to for dinner 3 days ago, only to discover that it was GONE. I SHIT THEE NOT. That photo? Will NEVER BE TAKEN AGAIN. The whole place was gutted and had workers crawling all over it putting up new wooden walls and the veranda was gone. So we did not go there for lunch. I mean obviously they're just refurbishing--very dramatically--so they're not GONE gone, but still! I loved the atmosphere of that little spot. Sadface =(
However, as I said, I don't think it's possible to have a sub-par meal in Byron, so we went into another café not far down the road and it was, once again, awesome. Though Cassie's chai latte was apparently a bit shit. But the sliders were faaabulous X9 one with smoked salmon, one with chorizo, and the bacon closest to camera. Sogood.
We waved Byron goodbye and went straight onto Coffs, where we scored the best motel we had the entire trip. Comfortable, close to the action, view of the pool and surrounding shrubbery from the room, friendly staff and a decent sized bathroom. The woman at the front desk recommended we go to Latitude 30 for a coffee, the view of the marina and the walk over to Muttonbird Island, so we did that since we had a good few hours before dinner yet. This was the view from one side of the restaurant, out over some choppy sea and darkening clouds.
There's a storm a-coming!
More warnings of wild weather.
Back towards the town. Storms approaching everywhere but still calm and blue over Coffs.
And out the other side at the marina. We decided at that point that their menu looked good, so we booked in for dinner there, too, then went for that walk over to Muttonbird Island.
More of the marina and storm clouds. I think it was around about here we started seeing lightning strikes :D
Muttonbird Island. No vegetation except for tough, short grasses.
I love when the sky's that colour, and that contrast between the white cloud and the dark one behind it.
From Muttonbird Island back down the coast, with the edge of Coffs on the far right. There was action like that going on all the way up and down the coast, with flashes and fingers and forks of lightning and deep distant rumbles of thunder, but Coffs was just in a calm little pocket.
The two bright orange lights in the marina are just to the left of the restaurant. Just as we got back to the car, it started pissing with rain and Coffs finally got its bit of storm. So that was well timed on our part =3 We headed back to the motel for an hour or so before dinner, it being too dark and wet to do anything but too early to eat yet. Sat reading and playing Yoshi, then off do dinner!
Cassie's pork belly *salivates*
And my lamb. It was a fantastic place. Fine dining food but with country hospitality X3 The lamb was so tender and perfect, and I'd be tempted to say it was probably from a farm nearby if we'd seen more than a sum total of six sheep on the way up. Sheep are further inland in NSW. Anwyay. They had, like, three varieties of Coopers* on tap and another four or five on the menu, and half the wine list was such familiar names as The Lane and Henschke and Yalumba and Petaluma and St Hallet and I just had to ask if there was a South Australian involved in the place, because damnit I just felt so at home on that wine list XD Waiter said no, but they HAD won best wine list for some hospitality awards thing.
*Each state has their 'flagship' beer, the one everyone associates with the state. NSW's is Toohey's, Queensland's is XXXX (pronounced 'Four-Ex'), Victoria's is VB (aka Fosters). South Australia's is Coopers. We're particularly proud of it because it's the largest Australian-owned brewery since Fosters was bought out by the South Africans and Lion Nathan was bought out by the Japanese. In SA it's just considered beer, but interstate it's considered boutique, so to see seven varieties of it on the wine list was impressive and felt so South Australian you can't believe it.
And dessert! A delicious pannacotta with dried fruit. I can never look past a pannacotta.
Next day it was just driving all the way back to Sydney, with a stop in the little town of Kempsey for lunch, just north of Port Macquarie. We figured it seemed like the last place we'd be able to find something better than Macca's or pub food, but the main street was in heavy roadworks mode and we didn't really want to have jackhammers while we were eating. There was a shopping centre at the end of the road, so we figured we'd just go around the corner, find a park and grab something there. Except that 'around the corner' led over a bridge over the river and out of town XD Except, as we were looking for somewhere to chuck a U-ey, there was a hand-painted sign pointing to the Riverside Café, so we figured we'd give that a shot. This is it :D What a perfect little place!
The aforementioned bridge. It did take a while to be served, but it was so much better than Macca's or pub meals so we were happy.
The end! Mostly. Wednesday we just watched more of Orange is the New Black and that was largely it, then Thursday I was back on the plane home =( Back to winter, which is slowly but surely thawing now. And that was my 30th birthday road trip up the north coast of New South Wales! It was even more awesome than I had hoped for. I could spend a week in Byron Bay doing everything around there, and Coffs Harbour had a surprising lot to do, too. And Quay. The absolute best experience with the best people; amazing. Perfect two weeks all 'round <3 <3
So we left off at Byron Bay, after which we headed up across the border into Queensland. We crossed the border with CONTRABAND because the border was just a metal sign along the by that time 6-lane Pacific Highway and there was nowhere to drop off the said contraband. It was a banana. Taking fruit and veg across borders is not a thing you're allowed to do in Australia, mostly because of fruit fly, which is always made a Big Deal of going through airports but apparently not for driving between Queensland and NSW. We figured this made sense, because the Gold Coast technically straddles the border, so people live, for example, in NSW and work in Queensland. So they'd be taking fruit across the border for lunch every day and that'd just be jolly impractical. Because, y'know, having a different time zone for both halves of the city over summer makes so much sense.
BRIS VEGAS, BABY. This was the view from the top of... that hill with a really weird name. Mount Coot-Tha, thanks Google. Shuddup my Brisbane geography is minimal at best. So as we were driving up over one of the many bridges that cross the Brisbane River, just as I was thinking WOW TALL BUILDINGS, Cassie just came out with, 'It's so small' because of course she's from Sydney and I'm from little old Adelaide, but we were both foreigners in a foreign land by this point. On the far right there you'll see the Wheel of Brisbane, which I keep calling the Brisbane Eye because srsly they missed an opportunity there. We went on that later on because tourists.
Also it weirds me out that you can barely see the sea. Every Australian city is pretty much built on the seafront, so to have one that's river-centric is weird. I mean, it's there, but it looks like it's a pretty solid drive from the CBD.
And zoomed out a bit. Brisbane River on the right, the one you would have heard about flooding a few years ago, because Brisbane is built on a floodplain. Weird Queenslanders.
Panorama again! We had lunch in the café on the left there, along with Cassie's grandpa, who kindly treated us to lunch :D
I didn't notice that other person's hand in my photo. Whoops =/
So we got to our hotel, right nearby Southbank, which is the tourism hub of Brissy, and headed out to enjoy Saturday night in Bris Vegas. So yes, this is Southbank. This is pretty much what you get for, idk, kilometre or two? Too early in the season yet for the bougainvillea to be in flower yet, but it was all so beautiful and tropical. You wouldn't think half of it had been washed away a few years ago.
Continuing along Southbank to this lawn surrounded by rainforest.
Little bit of bougainvillea, just starting to come out. Imagine all of that covered in purple flowers 8D
Between this photo and the last we just happened upon a market! Just a little one, but we had fun wandering through that and hoping for food stalls, but all they had was donuts and corn on the cob, no actual dinner fare. I'm sure I must have bought something there but can't for the life of me remember what it was now. Maybe I'm getting confused with Cassie buying things, idk. Anyway.
Brisbane CBD at night across the river.
Little rainforest walk we found :D This would've been so gorgeous in daylight. Still quite lovely at night, though.
And again.
SOMEHOW this Nepalese pagoda survived the floods. I guess the water didn't come up this high? It was incredible, so much detailing and gold.
From the Wheel of Brisbane, which for some reason I didn't get a photo of itself. Whoops.
Convention Centre to the left. When we booked into our hotel room the girl on checkin desk asked us excitedly if we were going to Sexpo. Which was a thing that was on at the Convention Centre that weekend. We did not XD
Finally we gave up looking for food and just Googled somewhere with good reviews, ending up with a Japanese restaurant. This wasn't it. The one we had looked up was closed despite its opening hours clearly stating it should have been open. Still, the street seemed to be a good-eats-for-dinner type street so we wandered along looking for something interesting and came across another Japanese restaurant that hadn't come up in our earlier searches but which looked awesome and had lots of people in it. It was indeed awesome. We were up at the counter (see Cassie there for reference X3), with a screen to order from which felt both typically cool Japanese futuristic and also a bit impersonal, but we also got a waitress anyway. So we could see the guys cooking and had fun picking which meals were ours X3 We got about 6-ish reasonably small things and they were all so amazing X9 Also discovered the place had only been open since March, so they didn't yet have a web presence, but they also said they're opening another restaurant in Adelaide! I anticipate this muchly.
From the outside. Such a pretty little spot! Also, these two photos are a lie; they're from the night after. Because we went there twice, because it was SO GOOD and we couldn't fit in the sukiyaki and had to come back for that X3 Also it was close to the hotel.
After that we went back to the hotel where I caught the second half of the Crows v Brisbane 8D Which was aired on a secondary station and certainly only got aired at all because Brisbane was involved. Queensland doesn't care about AFL. Cassie's first comment was that they had really tiny shorts. Yes. Yes, they do. Then she spent the rest of the match reading and laughing at me >>
Day 2 in Brisbane was pretty typical city stuff. We slept in because for the first time we didn't have a chuck out time, then just went to Westfield to go shopping for a few basics and lunch, bummed around until 4pm when the centre closed (...wtf Brisbane what to you people DO after 4pm on a Sunday?) then went back to the hotel room until dinner time. It was basically a wind-down day, so no exciting photos except the above two at the same place as on Saturday XD Monday we were back on the road, hightailing it back to Sydney.
Back in Byron! Because I realised I hadn't actually taken a photo of the town yet. It's a very convenient lunch stop, being 2-ish hours from Brisbane after chuck out time at 10am. We were considering the place we'd been to for dinner 3 days ago, only to discover that it was GONE. I SHIT THEE NOT. That photo? Will NEVER BE TAKEN AGAIN. The whole place was gutted and had workers crawling all over it putting up new wooden walls and the veranda was gone. So we did not go there for lunch. I mean obviously they're just refurbishing--very dramatically--so they're not GONE gone, but still! I loved the atmosphere of that little spot. Sadface =(
However, as I said, I don't think it's possible to have a sub-par meal in Byron, so we went into another café not far down the road and it was, once again, awesome. Though Cassie's chai latte was apparently a bit shit. But the sliders were faaabulous X9 one with smoked salmon, one with chorizo, and the bacon closest to camera. Sogood.
We waved Byron goodbye and went straight onto Coffs, where we scored the best motel we had the entire trip. Comfortable, close to the action, view of the pool and surrounding shrubbery from the room, friendly staff and a decent sized bathroom. The woman at the front desk recommended we go to Latitude 30 for a coffee, the view of the marina and the walk over to Muttonbird Island, so we did that since we had a good few hours before dinner yet. This was the view from one side of the restaurant, out over some choppy sea and darkening clouds.
There's a storm a-coming!
More warnings of wild weather.
Back towards the town. Storms approaching everywhere but still calm and blue over Coffs.
And out the other side at the marina. We decided at that point that their menu looked good, so we booked in for dinner there, too, then went for that walk over to Muttonbird Island.
More of the marina and storm clouds. I think it was around about here we started seeing lightning strikes :D
Muttonbird Island. No vegetation except for tough, short grasses.
I love when the sky's that colour, and that contrast between the white cloud and the dark one behind it.
From Muttonbird Island back down the coast, with the edge of Coffs on the far right. There was action like that going on all the way up and down the coast, with flashes and fingers and forks of lightning and deep distant rumbles of thunder, but Coffs was just in a calm little pocket.
The two bright orange lights in the marina are just to the left of the restaurant. Just as we got back to the car, it started pissing with rain and Coffs finally got its bit of storm. So that was well timed on our part =3 We headed back to the motel for an hour or so before dinner, it being too dark and wet to do anything but too early to eat yet. Sat reading and playing Yoshi, then off do dinner!
Cassie's pork belly *salivates*
And my lamb. It was a fantastic place. Fine dining food but with country hospitality X3 The lamb was so tender and perfect, and I'd be tempted to say it was probably from a farm nearby if we'd seen more than a sum total of six sheep on the way up. Sheep are further inland in NSW. Anwyay. They had, like, three varieties of Coopers* on tap and another four or five on the menu, and half the wine list was such familiar names as The Lane and Henschke and Yalumba and Petaluma and St Hallet and I just had to ask if there was a South Australian involved in the place, because damnit I just felt so at home on that wine list XD Waiter said no, but they HAD won best wine list for some hospitality awards thing.
*Each state has their 'flagship' beer, the one everyone associates with the state. NSW's is Toohey's, Queensland's is XXXX (pronounced 'Four-Ex'), Victoria's is VB (aka Fosters). South Australia's is Coopers. We're particularly proud of it because it's the largest Australian-owned brewery since Fosters was bought out by the South Africans and Lion Nathan was bought out by the Japanese. In SA it's just considered beer, but interstate it's considered boutique, so to see seven varieties of it on the wine list was impressive and felt so South Australian you can't believe it.
And dessert! A delicious pannacotta with dried fruit. I can never look past a pannacotta.
Next day it was just driving all the way back to Sydney, with a stop in the little town of Kempsey for lunch, just north of Port Macquarie. We figured it seemed like the last place we'd be able to find something better than Macca's or pub food, but the main street was in heavy roadworks mode and we didn't really want to have jackhammers while we were eating. There was a shopping centre at the end of the road, so we figured we'd just go around the corner, find a park and grab something there. Except that 'around the corner' led over a bridge over the river and out of town XD Except, as we were looking for somewhere to chuck a U-ey, there was a hand-painted sign pointing to the Riverside Café, so we figured we'd give that a shot. This is it :D What a perfect little place!
The aforementioned bridge. It did take a while to be served, but it was so much better than Macca's or pub meals so we were happy.
The end! Mostly. Wednesday we just watched more of Orange is the New Black and that was largely it, then Thursday I was back on the plane home =( Back to winter, which is slowly but surely thawing now. And that was my 30th birthday road trip up the north coast of New South Wales! It was even more awesome than I had hoped for. I could spend a week in Byron Bay doing everything around there, and Coffs Harbour had a surprising lot to do, too. And Quay. The absolute best experience with the best people; amazing. Perfect two weeks all 'round <3 <3