Living on the edge in Brisbane

We’ve settled in very nicely to our townhouse close to Brisbane city and are enjoying all the benefits of being in an urban area – shops and transport close by, walking distance to cafes and other amenities etc. 

However, there are of course disadvantages like aircraft noise early in the morning (this doesn’t seem to be quite so bad now or maybe we’ve just become used to it!). Then there’s the noise of rubbish trucks and gardeners mowing and using noisy rotary strimmers every day of the working week – this is high density living for you!

There’s also the lady next door, living in one of the few remaining timber “Queenslander” style houses, who on Sundays and Church festivals such as Good Friday and Easter likes to sing (warble) hymns very loudly on her balcony right near our bedroom window. She’s marginally more musical than the Kookaburras who also delight in an early start but I enjoy hearing those Australian icons more. 

Strangely, despite living in a more densely populated place compared to anywhere we have ever lived together, we have been surprised by the high population of wild life here.  

As well as this water dragon knocking on the window next to the front door one day, we have seen loads of skinks and geckos in our tiny yard, and a possum who usually visits at night but has walked boldly along the top of the fence while we were sitting outside. 

We also hear lots of birds crowing, screeching, twittering and sometimes singing, and at night, the massive fruit bats squawk and quarrel. It’s a noisy neighbourhood!

Preparations for our new “bush cottage” are moving along nicely. The house is being built offsite but back on “our”patch of land on Ben and Sarah’s property, the driveway has now been cut and a pad prepared for our water tanks which have been ordered (unfortunately we have realised that the pad is too high but it can be lowered without too much drama.)

We have also finally organised the installation of our own sewage treatment plant, the water tanks are ordered, the land behind where the house is being built has been cleared of weeds, saplings and mulched, providing a decent and important firebreak and a driveway has been cut.

It has been a busy time so we haven’t missed being on the water too badly although when the new owners of Sunday (now known as Sunday ll as it has been reregistered in Australia as opposed to NZ) sent us some photos just before she was launched after her big refurbishment, we definitely did feel a pang of “homesickness “.

Talking of sailing, we had a lovely visit from our sailing buddies Sue and John who we met in April 2021 in Türkiye. We travelled extensively with them through Türkiye, Greece, and Montenegro until the end of last year and also travelled overland from Austria to Montenegro via a very rough one lane mountain track across Bosnia in our camper van!  Plus other travel adventures as well!  We are planning more exciting Australian travel experiences in the future  when we take to the open road with our 4WD vehicles towing our caravans!

We also had a visit from my niece’s husband who was visiting Brisbane from England for an international conference. 

We had a lovely couple of days together and spent one of the days at Ben and Sarah’s beautiful property (location of our future home) in Lake Manchester. 

Recently we have also welcomed Lenchen – another old friend – back to Brisbane. We first met when our children were at Primary School around 25 years ago! 

After many years in Gympie, Lenchen has moved to Brisbane and is now living very close to us. It has been great to connect again!

We had a fun night at a candlelit string quartet concert at St John’s Anglican Cathedral. The concert itself was very pleasant but the most exciting part of the evening was getting there!  According to Google maps, it should have taken only 15 minutes to get to the Cathedral from our place but we expected there to be traffic due to rush hour so we left a total of 40 minutes to get to the concert. That should have left us plenty of time to arrive and sedately wander in, find our seats and settle in to enjoy the candlelit ambiance before the music began. Unfortunately that was not how the evening unfolded!

Soon after leaving the house we found ourselves in a massive traffic jam. After sitting in the hardly moving traffic for 10 minutes, Jonathan decided to seek an alternative route so he diverted down a side road and after weaving through the back streets made it to the other main route into town only to find it was equally jammed up! We had been driving 20 minutes and weren’t yet even half way there!  Eventually the traffic thinned out somewhat but there was a string of traffic lights to negotiate and each one was on red as we approached it. Another 10 minutes ticked by and we were still almost 10 minutes to our destination!  

We honestly thought we wouldn’t arrive in time to get to our seats before the big cathedral doors swung shut. With a bit of deft driving on Jonathan’s part we arrived on the dot of 6.30 pm.   Fortunately we made it in the nick of time and were ushered to our seats just as the quartet were about to walk on stage!  Whew! Talk about living on the edge!