While I was in fremantle, I got in touch with a mate who lives on the other side of the country, in Brisbane…we worked out a few days that would be good for me to visit, and I booked the flights…though kimmie and I are both from Indiana originally, neither one of us has lived there in a long time, and we met when we both lived in garmisch…conveniently, another mate of ours from garmisch, who is aussie but lives in the states was planning to visit her hometown of Brisbane at the same time…yahoo!!
My flight was supposed to leave perth just after midnight, not exactly a convenient time of day…ugh…I landed in brisbane at 0715, only a few minutes later than scheduled…we left perth late, but had a great tailwind all the way to Brisbane…timing worked out perfectly, and I got outside just as kim drove up…woo hoo…
She drove us back to her house, both of us were chatting the entire way…it’d been three years since we’d seen each other, and there was a lot to talk about…the biggest thing to talk about was her partner, whom she met not too long after the last time we saw each other…they’ve been together just under three years now, and he’s the reason she lives in Brisbane…the house is in a suburb, though it’s really just a neighborhood not far from city centre…driving “into the city” only takes 15 minutes or so…the house is on top of a hill, which makes for great breezes…it also allowed them to avoid any of the flooding that hit the city, and parts of the state last year…alan’s son is almost 10, not long after kimmie and I arrived, alan drove him to school…while alan was out, kimmie fixed breakfast and coffee…she and alan both drink a lot of coffee…they have an espresso maker, a French press, and a regular drip coffee maker…my favourite was the espresso maker because it has a milk frother…I WANT A MILK FROTHER!! I loved adding milk to my teaJ…I do that normally, but it’s a lot more fun when it’s frothed milk…yes, I know that’s silly…
After breakfast, we took the dogs for a walk in the bushland across the street…ziggy is a poodle mix, and pepper is a black lab mix…ziggy is a couple years old, and therefore really calm…at least, in comparison to pepper, who never stops moving…taking the two of them for a walk is not easy and calm…they both like to move, and fast…pepper is still a puppy and doesn’t know better, ziggy likes to pee on every tree…it was fun to see them so excited…there are a number of trails through the bush, and it’s really easy to forget that you’re in a city of 2 million people…I got to hear my first cookaburra…apparently they don’t just sit in the old gum tree!!
Kim and alan both work as day traders on the Australian stock market…they had to work that morning, so I chilled out…I’d been doing that a lot lately, and was happy to keep doing it…the stock market opens at 10 each morning, I don’t remember when it closes…their home office looks as you would expect it to, with quite a few computer screens…while they were working, I didn’t really understand anything that was being said…stock names, shorting, dumping, bouncing, etc…it was one of the last days of the calm before the storm of the US credit rating being dropped…
That afternoon, kimmie took off work, and we went for a walk on the beaches of wynnum…(another “suburb”)…the weather had been cloudy, windy and rainy in freo for several weeks, in Brisbane it was all sun and blue skies…it’s hard to take a bad photo when you’ve got blue skies and blue water…from there we picked conor up at his school…I don’t know if all aussie primary school students wear uniforms, but he does…
That night we had dinner with an American friend of kim’s...she had a couple friends in town visiting from new York, and another chick was there as well…all six of us at the table were American, which doesn’t happen often…it was a restaurant for “Himalayan” food…good food, way tastier than what I ever had when I was trekking through the Himalayas…when kimmie and I rocked up, I must’ve looked like death warmed over, cause that’s how I felt…a combination of jet lag, a good but long day, car sickness and caffeine withdrawal meant I had a headache and was really nauseous…I couldn’t read the menu at all, I trusted others to decide for me…and they decided well…I started feeling better as soon as food was in my tummy…thank goodness…it’s never fun when you can barely look up because you feel so rotten…I was a much happier camper on the way home…
And I fell asleep fast not long after we got home…
The next day kimmie opened the day on the market, then we went into the city to meet up with chelise…chelise is originally from the Brisbane area, but now lives in vegas…she and her partner of 2.5 years had come to visit for a couple weeks…kim and I both met chelise in garmisch, it was fantastic for the three of us to see each other again, so far away in the world from where we first met…lots of catching up to do…chelise didn’t know I was coming, it was a fun surprise…good times…
From there, kimmie took us in the wrong direction on our way to the botanical gardens…as she puts it, she just wanted to take me on a tour of a boring part of the city…hee hee… we did eventually get to the gardens, and it was a lovely walk throughout…the gardens were completely under water during the floods, they’ve done a pretty good job rebuilding/replanting…I don’t know if it was the season, or what, but there wasn’t as much colour as I was expecting…maybe in spring? I loved walking on the boardwalk by the river…there is a lovely view of the city from the boardwalk…
When we got back to the house, kim realized she didn’t have keys…whoops…she did figure out a way to break in, it was entertaining…lol…you had to be there, I’m not revealing how she did it…
Dinner that night was after alan brought conor home from footie practice…alan is the head coach of the team…alan cooked burgers, kim put together the rest of the meal…kim is a vegetarian, and prefers to avoid touching meat as well…I don’t blame her…I eat meat, but I don’t like touching raw meat…yuck…I’m a huge fan of home cooking…
Friday morning I went with kim to boot camp…it’s a fitness craze sweeping the world…classes are usually around 10 people, and meet at odd hours of the day…we started at 0530…(it was still dark outside, and this class was outside!)…the class lasts an hour, and is different each time…the idea is to keep people coming back, because they never get bored…and, because the class is only an hour, you can work hard without collapsing…kim has been going regularly for about 6 months, alan goes with her during the weeks they don’t have conor…in other words, kim is fit…I’m not…it’s embarrassing how unfit I am…I can run, but not quickly…I have no upper body strength or endurance, and that’s where I failed…ugh…we did some speed boxing, running, ropes, and situps…you know those ropes you see the contestants using on biggest loser? They’re heavy!! Anywho, we got home from that, and I fell asleep…ooops…while I was asleep, alan left for a conference in sydney, and kim drove conor to school…I feel like an old lady whose body is breaking down too fast!!
Kimberly worked the entire trading day, while I slept and read…a relaxing day…we picked up conor from school later…that night conor had one of his friends over for a sleepover…it’s funny to see how kids behave differently when they’re around each other, as opposed to just being around the adults in their lives…It can be exhausting, to say the least…dominos pizza for dinner that night…
After we got home from the game, conor went over to the neighbor’s house, one of the kids over there is on conor’s team…apparently that house serves only healthy food…no processed sugar anywhere, ever!! The kids are all pretty skinny…kim and I hung out for a while, and when conor came back, his mom came to pick him up…she’d been on her honeymoon for a week, she’d gotten married the weekend before…a kiwi lady, quite nice…
After she picked up conor, we took the dogs to a beach…I’ve forgotten the name of the beach, but it seems to be a popular place to take dogs…there is a large area for the dogs to run around, and they don’t have to be on leashes…pepper went crazy, ziggy loved it too…I’m not sure if they’d ever been in that particular area previously? We got to the beach at high tide, I guess that isn’t the best time to visit…at low tide, you can wade out a little way to a sand bar…kim says ziggy doesn’t like to get wet, so it’s apparently quite entertaining to watch him try to avoid the water while still making his way out to the sand bar…lol…pepper doesn’t care…our feet got a bit mucky and wet, all in good fun…on the way home from the beach, we picked up alan at the airport, his conference didn’t last that long…when we got home, kim and alan washed the dogs, as they were both covered in sand, and a little mud…pepper then dried herself off on my bed…hee hee…
My last day in Brisbane was a slow starter, but that’s perfectly fine by me…after a bit of discussion, Kimberly and I decided to go to a place called lone pine koala sanctuary…according to their signs, it’s the first and largest koala sanctuary…they’ve got lots of koalas, kanagaroos, wallabies, a platypus, dingoes, Tasmanian devils, birds and bats…we loved them all…oh, and emus…emus get a scary look on their face, you think they’re going to peck at you with that enormous beak…eeeek…I’m pretty sure they’re able to move quickly (but not fly) though in this area they simply walked away if they wanted to move…big claw feet…the emus were where we started…it’s a large-ish enclosure, you walk in through a double set of gates…basically a giant lawn area, with emus and kangaroos hanging out…you can buy food for the kangaroos, but we didn’t…I was completely fascinated by the kangaroos in particular…since they’re only native to Australia, this was the first time I’d been able to get up close to them…like dogs, they love to be scratched on the chest, they sort of lean into it…we got to see a couple kangaroos with joeys in their pouches…at some point, the feet get to big to be in the pouch, so the feet are left hanging outside the pouch…hee hee…
I had my picture taken with a koala, it was redic cute…koalas move very slowly, it isn’t difficult to take a good photo…I got to hold a 4 month old girl called yarula…LOVE IT!! The photo is an additional cost, but the money goes toward taking care of the animals in the reserve, so I didn’t mind…I wouldn’t do that all the time, but this time I thought it worth it…the reserve has a number of different tree areas set up for the koalas, for the old geezers, for the bachelors, for the ladies, etc…it’s fun…not that I’d be able to tell the difference between all of them…they all look the same to me…they eat a whole lot of leaves every day…a LOT…
We also listened to a lecture on the platypus…the reserve currently has one, but is looking for another…they swim, a lot…I hadn’t seen one before, at least not that I can recall…they don’t seem to stay still for long…
Eventually, we went back to the house…conor and alan arrived about the same time, they’d gone to the AFL game…the Brisbane lions lost to I forget who…quite the exciting game…kim made dinner, some kind of pasta…then they took me to the airport…my flight back to perth was 6 hours, ugh…
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