I was looking at one of my last posts, and it mentioned Tim spending Christmas on the beach in his new home of Brisbane Australia. Now, a lot more time has passed then I would like and Dianne and I are visiting Tim and Fleur in Brisbane Australia. There are a lot more pictures with this one on flickr. I decided to not just leave it at pictures, as I wanted to say something about our experience so far as well.
When I welcomed the joining of Fleur's and Tim's families at their wedding in the speech that I posted on this blog I said, "Another thing, ...., that I am maybe still slowly learning
was that when you marry someone you marry their family as well." So here we are in Brisbane, celebrating our 30th wedding anniversary and this is how the lesson is going.
We arrived Sunday after loosing Saturday to the international dateline. Tim and Fleur live in a Queenslander, a bungalow on stilts and when he showed us to our room, which has a screen on to their wrap around verandah there was a nice sunny cross breeze blowing through it by design. It is winter here and goes down to ~ 10 C at night, but the days have been beautiful around 18 with sunshine and now I have been in the pacific ocean (or at least my feet), but that is part of the rest of this story. On Sunday Tim took us to church, which reminded Dianne and I a lot of the Delhi International Christian Fellowship because of the same choruses. The rest of Sunday, I don't really remember, but I do know that we managed to stay up till 8:00 pm, because I though we were home free when it got dark but it turns out that it gets dark around 5:00 here and I still had 3 hours to go.
Monday we went for dinner with John, Allison (Fleur's parents), Trent and Thania (Fleur's brother and wife) to a Turkish restaurant. We met on the South Bank, roughly across the river from Tim's work which is an easy bus or bike ride from where they live. It was pretty cold ~ 10 C, and there were gas heaters on the patios that we passed. Since that night we have walked the foot bridge over the Brisbane River to the South Bank a couple of times, but the foot bridge itself is of some interest. Tim and his colleagues at Red Hat have convened a people's pub at the observation stations on the bridge a few times. Right after work they can head out the door and basically right on to the bridge, where they watch the sun set soon after. The South Bank itself hosts a number of restaurants, an art gallery, the redeveloped site of the 1988 expo and a man-made beach that you can see Dianne trying out in one of my photos.
On the weekend we were on a natural beach on the Eastern most point of Australia, as well as at Brunswick Heads, which is a place from Fleur's family history. There is a play pirate ship there that Fleur remembers as being much larger when she was a child, as well as a really nice cottage that is in the family of one of Tim's colleagues that we kindly had the use of for the weekend. Tim got a record player earlier in the week so that he could play some records that a record shop owning neighbor had given him, so we enjoyed poking around op (second hand) shops looking for records and a copy of the Hobbit on a rainy Saturday afternoon as well as going for a lighthouse walk in nearby Byron Bay on a sunny Sunday. Today we were also on Burleigh Heads beach which has a surfer museum that is very interesting as well as people kite surfing. We put our feet in, but it was pretty cloudy and raining off and on, so we just walked up and down the beach.
I can remember when I was a kid, digging holes in our back yard, that I wondered if they could reach through the earth to Australia. It seems like only a few days after that when Dianne and I went to visit Tim and meet Fleur in Scotland for our 20th wedding anniversary. Now it is our 30th year of marriage and we are actually in Australia, even without having to go through magma to get there!
