January 30: Brisbane to Toowoomba

We woke up bright an early since the time in Brisbane was 4 hours earlier than in Honolulu (well actually 20 hours later….but your brain doesn’t really care about what day it is, just what time it is…so for the brain it was 4 hours earlier.

While Miss Linda slept in, I took a walk at 6 am a few blocks into downtown and on return passed a local coffee and pastry shop called Pie Face.  I got a coffee black with sugar and for Linda a “flat white”….Australian/British for a latte.

My computer had died somewhere on the flight but there was an Apple store a 5 minute walk from the hotel.  We walked to the Botanical Gardens (all the plants were different!) and then to the Apple Store. We were helped by a young woman named Adila, whos ran diagnostics that said the hard drive had failed. She said it was covered by my extended warranty but would take a week to fix.   She took it downstairs to the tech geeks and they told her that it might be just the cable from the start button to the hard drive. They put me at the front of the queue, and told me to come back in 90 minutes. If it was just the cable, it would be fixed.

We walked around lovely Brisbane: fresh, clean and new, punctuated by very old handsome buildings and spent time in the botanical gardens along the river.  

When we returned to Apple…voila! It was the cable and it was fixed.  So thank you Adila….great Aussie hospitality!

Then off to get the “caravan” (motorhome) from Sam at Around Australia Motorhomes.  He spent an hour with us going over everything, and answering all of our smart (and dumb) questions with grace.

At 3:15 pm AEST on Friday Jan 30, we pulled away from the motorhome rental, I shifted with my left hand from 1^st to 2^nd to 3^rd, made a left turn (which I now think of as right turns as they are not across traffic), drove a block, made another left, and then up the onramp shifting thru all of the gears and merging onto the M1 Expressway just before the Friday afternoon rush hour.

We drove about an hour and then stopped at a Woolworth’s….yes Woolworth’s and Cole’s are the two big grocery store chains, and provisioned the caravan, with a stop next door at the “bottle shop” for some James Boag’s Tassie beer, white wine from the Clare Valley, and Shiraz from the McClaren Vale.  Yum!

Then up the twisty steep road to the top of the Great Dividing Range to Toowoomba  (the Garden Capital of Australia) at 2600 feet above sea level.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toowoomba

Motorhome Day #1 successfully completed. No grinding of gears or bashing of fenders.

Starting tomorrow: almost 1500 miles of two lane roads southwest down to the Adelaide area in South Australia. For you wine lovers you will know it as the home of the Barossa Valley and the McLaren Vale.