So much to see and do!

The title is my lame effort at an excuse for not adding to my blog for a few days.  We have been mildly busy and enjoying the area around Brisbane.  It is such a nice area with lots of things to do.

On Wednesday (Oct 2) we went to Mount Coot-Tha and had a lovely lunch at The Summit Café.  Lovely views of the city from a really nice place to eat.

Downtown Brisbane from Mount Coot-Tha

Thursday was a fun and exciting day.  We drove to the Gold Coast, which is a lovely area south of Brisbane with lots of hotels and beaches. 

Sea World has an amusement park there but they also do Whale Watching tours.  That was our purpose of going there.  It was well worth the effort.  We went about a mile off shore in a very nice boat.

The Whale watching was superb as you can see from these pictures.

We later drove to The Polish Place on Mount Tambourine.  From there we had a lovely view of the Gold Coast Area

A nice view of the valley to the West,

And a nice lunch in a polish style restaurant.

Yesterday, we started the morning with home made waffles on the deck.

And then it was a trip to Ipswich and the Queensland Railroad museum.  An interesting find was this locomotive made by the Baldwin Locomotive Co. of Philadelphia, PA.  It was made around WWII and part of the lend-lease program.  Since it was narrow gauge, the US didn’t want it back.  It is now stored in the shops and will eventually be rebuilt to operational status.  It is significant to Katie because her Dad used to work for Baldwin Locomotive during the war years. 

It was fun to see all of the engines there plus the other displays (we are going to ride a steam train on Sunday). 

We got to ride on the Transverser.  It is normally used to move engines and cars between the various repair shops, but is also used to transport tourists between the displays.

They even had a display of “steam punk” art.

This is actually an operational CD player!

Today the adventure continues.  More later.