Nicer in Noosa

As I look out of the window here at home I can barely see the beach through the low cloud and rain. What a contrast to a very pleasant week in Noosa that finished just a few days ago!

Noosa beach. Air: 22C, water 19C.

We were there to visit our friends Russell and Sue who are enjoying a post-retirement holiday with the help of serial visitors like us. Despite the 4.00 am start it was wonderful to swap wintery Hobart for the blue skies of southern Queensland, where at this time of year it seems to be sunny every day with a daily maximum of 22C.

Noosa in the distance from Mt Tinbeerwah.

Jean had never been in Queensland and it is over 30 years since I was in that neck of the woods on a post-conference tour. Noosa beats the rest of the Sunshine Coast in that it is more than just a coastal strip of apartments squeezed between the highway and the beach. The point, with its national park, and the river that winds its way back into lakes and mangroves for many kilometres, make a much more interesting landscape. And of course it's a "smart spot" too: all those expensive boutiques and restaurants along Hastings Street, a far cry from the pictures of the point break that I remember in Surfer Bimonthly, back in the 1960s.

We enjoyed several walks and many new birds, including the ridiculous brush turkeys that wander everywhere, and made friends with several butcherbirds who readily accepted bacon rinds from our fingers as we sat on the deck.

Brush turkey. Common along Hastings St!

Lazy sub-tropical lifestyle.

We didn't climb this one, but a couple like it.

Cane fields and distant Glasshouse Mountains, from Mt Coolum.

Jeannie descending Mt Coolum.

OCD barbeque?

Sunset at the beach, a glass of wine.........

Many others enjoying the sunset.

A very pleasant break and we may well join the snowbirds flying north next winter.