Off hours

 Here's a few pictures taken in the off hours, which there are few, but by taking advantage of Saturday's there are things that are close enough that in a few hours you can have a mini-holiday.  We've visited botanical gardens with all types of vegetation and flowers.





This is Redcliff, which has a terrific beach area and is also great for whale watching and is noted for being the hometown of the BeeGees.

 We drove to festival days at Toowoomba, which is due West of Brisbane and much higher elevation and much less humidity.  Festival days were like the Idaho State Fair, a rose parade (sort of) and tours of local gardens.  It was big on floral arranging, quilts, parade and of course food and beverages.

 The quilt work was world class, the women who do this surely work year round to bring their secret handiwork that filled an auditorium.

Meanwhile, the men engage in lawn bowling, which is like big time bocci ball, some very accurate lagging was seenThe parade had something for everybody and we mean every body!



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 There were lovely flower gardens open for viewing, got some great ideas - to bad so many of the plants will not grow in Idaho

 Saturday was the last day of the Brisbane festival - it had lasted all through the month and featured live entertainment, a light show, craft fair and etc.  We walked through several times during the past weeks.  It was capped off with "River Fire" which is a big fireworks show which we watched near the temple.

 Thousands of people attended the fireworks - from our vantage point we could see them go off from 7 different locations.  It wasn't the 4th of July, but was a pretty good show.