Just Another Week...

On Tuesday I had to take my car to a place called Goodna for an insurance assessment. Just before we left Sydney, some idiot in a parking lot left a ding on my car & didn't have the decency to leave a note. Grrrrrr.....! Anyhoo... So I had to take it to this assessment centre in Goodna which, if there was a bridge over the blinking river, would have taken me about 15 minutes (about 8km) to get to. However, because we're in a semi-rural area, there's not much in the way of a road network and the lack of bridges over this very windy Brisbane river is startling! So I had to go the long way around.... Which took about 45 minutes to travel 14km!

A map showing A (home) to B (assessment centre) via the blue line. The red line is my wish-road/bridge.

But I have the luxury of time, so I enjoyed the drive and was quite chuffed that I got to go over the river on the Moggill Ferry! Now I was expecting something like this....

Malagas, South Africa - February 2007

Malagas, South Africa - February 2007

Malagas, South Africa - February 2007

Malagas, South Africa - February 2007

As I rounded the last corner of a beautiful countryside drive, this is what I was presented with....

The queue for the ferry - that's the ferry at the bottom of the road about to reach our side. (Click on the pic to enlarge)

These are the ferry fares and times

Ready to board! Here we go!

$1.60 and a 3 minutes later, I was over the river!

The ferry can take approximately 18 cars but it does take trucks as well so that would mean less cars. Also, pedestrians and people on bicycles are free.

Yesterday Scott had to go and do a repair down in Lismore. From home, Lismore is about 220km away down South into New South Wales. It took us about 3 and a half hours to get there and Scott finished the job in about an hour! *sigh* What to do with the rest of the day......? Hrmmmmm...... Byron Bay is less than an hour's drive from Lismore..... And it was a perfect day so we didn't hesitate.

Home (A) to Lismore (B) to Byron Bay (C)

We hadn't thought to take cozzies or a change of clothes for Scott. Hey! It was 5 o'clock in the bleedin' morning, give us a break! So we went on our quickest & most successful shopping expidition ever! A pair of boardies for Scott, 2-for-1 special on a couple of Byron Bay t-shirts, a pair of thongs (slip slops!) for Scott & a cozzie for me. All within 15 minutes! Oh, and two el-cheapo beach towels - also a 2-for-1 special.

But before we hit the beach, we had lunch at the Beach Hotel

A nice refreshing rock shandy for me....

Talking about rock shandies.... which consists of half soda water + half lemondade + Angistura Bitters. Here they have a similar drink called a lemon, lime & bitters which is lemonade, lime cordial and bitters. Yikes! It's sweet! Rock shandy isn't known here so each time I've got to explain to the barman how to make it. Maybe oneday I'll have educated them all! LOL!

Me coming out of the water in my new cozzie. Don't click on this one to enlarge - I'm large enough as it is! ;)

The perfect beach....

This lady was just making this beautiful sand sculpture of a naked figure lying in the sand - brilliant!

Mupersan in his new boardies!

On the way home, we decided to take the "shortest route". This is definitely very different to the "quickest route" by about an hour - and only 3km shorter! This route involved going back over the Moggill Ferry which we thought would be fun because Scott hadn't been over yet. Hrm.... we JUST made the last ferry! We got in the queue at 6.19pm - the last ferry left at 6.25pm. If we'd missed the last ferry, we would've had to detour 27km to get home! Yikes!

Cheers for now!
Mands