When I started this blog all I could think about was the flooding in Brisbane but I didn’t want to start with gloomy news and thought I should blog what eateries we enjoyed whilst we were in Brisbane and rather end with the day as we saw it…so here it is.
We arrived on the Saturday and went for drinks at Archive, a really nice bar in West End, they have a wide range of beer at great prices (the Holgate White Ale went down very smoothly), we enjoyed our drinks and the atmosphere was nice - looked like a nice place to come back to for food. We then headed into Paddington to find a tapas bar for dinner, but to our dismay everywhere we tried was closed for the month of January! So we ended up wandering in Milton on Park Road and into La Dolce Vita - the dessert was the highlight, I had a chocolate brownie with ice-cream. The mains were ok but nothing spectacular - burger boy had the chicken with risotto then knocked off half of my gnocchi (the portion was huge) and my friend had the beef ragu penne. Probably a place you would go just for a simple meal when you can’t be bothered cooking, comparing to Perth, it’d be like a Sienna equivalent. Very reasonably priced.
The following day we headed off to Byron Bay (prior to that we had an awesome breakfast at Cirque which I blogged about recently - you can read the blog here), luckily the rain stopped when we got there and burger boy managed to get in a swim (the water was the perfect temperature, not too cold but not luke warm like it is in Perth on an extremely hot day), we had take-away fish and chips at Fish Heads, it wasn’t a huge portion (though thinking about it, it could have been a nice portion and burger boy could have eaten most of the chips whilst I was washing off the mud I had stomped in) but it was very tasty, definitely recommend it. On the way back to Brisbane we dropped into Humble Pie in Billinudgel, massive space shared with Baskin Robins in a rather industrial looking area (it’s just off the Billinudgel exit) - the pies were as you would have at nice lunch bars but taste-wise not as good as the local steak pie I had at Mandurah’s Miami Bake House - price was good $4.80 for any of their pies.
On the last day we were in Brisbane, we were at Dome in the Brisbane CBD enjoying a big breakfast when we were asked to evacuate so they the staff could prepare for the flooding that was expected that evening. The flooding of the CBD was sooner and closer than we had realised - we headed straight for the airport and waited 8 hours there for a flight (in fear that if we didn’t go then and there we would risk the roads closing). On the way to the airport, we had seen businesses put up sandbags preparing for the floods but nothing could prepare us for what we watched at the airport TV as the media continued to show footage of the number of people who were lost to the floods and suburb by suburb being submerged in water. It was heartbreaking. I don’t think anything could ever repair the lives of those affected by the Queensland floods. I’ve donated to the Premier’s Flood Relief Appeal www.qld.gov.au/floods in hope it will make a small difference.
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