We’ve just been in Townsville for a week and a half, now I’m home for two days and then we are off to Brisbane and Coolum for a week. We had a relaxing break in Townsville. Lots of eating out, cruising the shops, walks on the Strand and a number of visitors, including this guy…

This is a goanna right outside our lounge window. Ugh. They are a type of monitor lizard. He’s more than a metre long but they can get much bigger (maybe 2 1/2-3 metres??). They give me the creeps BIG TIME because they can run very fast and they have a tendency to run UP things (including your legs). But they do eat snakes, so I suppose all God’s chillun got a place.
The Boys had to come back to Hughenden earlier than the Girls because Son had his driving test (he passed. yay.) so we had a couple of girly days without them. We saw The Devil Wears Prada. Laugh? You bet. It was pretty funny. Light and entertaining. Not a kmart label to be seen.

So we leave for Brisbane at 4:00 am tomorrow. It’s a l o o o n g drive from here (about 1400 km). Pete has an engineering conference at Coolum (gorgeous beach just north of Brisbane) and when he mentioned beach-front apartments with 180 degree ocean views, I said,”Oh YES. We are coming with you!” We will only have a couple of days in Brisbane but it will give us a chance to catch up with family and maybe do some shopping. Then five days of conference. The worst part of these things is always the dinners; I hate them. A whole room of people in designer clothes (that they paid for with credit cards) trying to impress each other, while I stand there without a single intelligent thing to say wondering if my kmart label is showing. Phooey.