southbound eucalyptus look the same

Once I picked up Storey from his boat trip, we got in the car and drove...and drove...and drove. In fact, we drove about 7 hours that day all the way back down to Calliope where we found a free campground on a river. It was the first night that we dared to leave the fly off the tent and enjoy the stars through the roof! It was a beautiful night!

The next day we did some more driving through miles of eucalyptus trees that looked remarkably like the miles of eucalyptus trees on the way north. We detoured off the A1 to take the Steve Irwin Memorial Parkway and visit the Glass House Mountains. We found a lookout point deep along some curvy hilly roads and looked at all the volcanic cones from our perch in the trees. There is an Aboriginal tail as to how these mountains came to be in their spots, but Captain Cook actually named them the Glass House Mountains after their resemblance to the glass factories in Europe.

We pushed on towards Brisbane and got caught up in a heap of Friday afternoon rush hour traffic there. Tired, hungry, and frustrated with the roads, we finally made it to Southport and Surfers Paradise. We had no idea that this area was such a city. It looks bigger than Brisbane with buildings all along the coast. We found a campground and squeezed into the last site available before having one of the craziest experiences on the trip.

Not very many places stay open real late in Australia, so we were not surprised to find that our food options were limited. The woman at the camp we stayed at recommended a place that we took some time to find and actually had to register at the front desk to enter. It turns out we went to a late-70's style casino and Bingo parlor where we could get food. The company was a raucous group of folks more than two times our age. My initial reaction was to head across the street to Domino's Pizza, but in the end, I laughed a lot and ate my meal in a crazy environment.