18.06.2009

Weekdays get a little crazy around here. I'm working from 5:30 on (and starting to actually work out again) and when Josh is around, I try to hang out with him (read: fix him breakfast, fix his lunch, cook dinner) so not much blogging gets done. But I did want to share the pictures from our drive home last Sunday.

A friend/co-worker of Josh had mentioned that if we were in the area of the Gold Coast, then we should try to go up to Mount Tamborine which has a network of walking trails and a drive throughout the national parks. So on Sunday, we took the scenic route and drove over to the Mount Tamborine area. It's about 30 minutes west of Surfers Paradise (isn't that crazy that the mountains are only 30 minutes from the beach?) and I'm glad that Josh was driving because there were some curvy, steep roads.

When we got to Mount Tamborine, there were TONS of people there. Every 2nd Sunday, they have a market....which I knew about. I thought that it was just going to be like a small farmers market, but it was more like a country fair. There were booths everywhere. We ended up not going in since it was cold that day and we were hungry (of course, I was hoping for funnel cakes and cotton candy, but Josh was looking for something with a little more substanance), so we kept driving. Right down the road, we came to about 20 cars parked on the side and all the occupants out at this look-out point.

Isn't it beautiful?
At one point of our drive, we could see the city of Surfers Paradise, but we were facing the wrong way at this point.

Turns out that this was launching point for hang-gliders.

This guy was just getting set-up so we went down the road to a Polish cafe and had some apple pancakes and walnut cake (it was more of a tea rather than breakfast) and came back and got to see 2 of the gliders take off.

Those guys are crazy.

As we're walking into the cafe though, there was this little outside sitting area with a bird feeding area in it. And there were about 30 parrots that keep flying to it to feed. It was pretty awesome.

I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but Australia has some amazing birds. On the drive out to the power station or on a walk out on the creek path, you'll see a flock of cockatoos (white birds with the yellow tuff) diving and squawking. Or out on the golf course, we get buzzed by little lorakeets (birds that are similar in color to the ones in these pictures, but smaller and SO much faster). We've also seen these types of parrots (?) in our day-to-day, but we haven't seen this many together or been able to get this close to them.

They kept flying from the trees to the feeding area.

Australia can be pretty awesome sometimes.