Nick treated himself a day off from work as today is his birthday – we won’t tell you his age except it is between 57-59🤪. The day was his to plan, so it commenced with a leisurely breakfast after he had returned from the gym – that is dedication to go to the gym on your birthday.
This is the view as we sat and sipped coffee and tea. Next plan was to head off for a bike ride from the apartment down to South Bank which is only about four kilometres away. Nicks good friend Josef from Germany joined us. His day didn’t start so well as he had to buy a new battery for his car as the one he had been sold two months previously from a guy in Darwin was toast.
We hired some bikes and cruised along the river bank through well manicured park land looking for a place to stop for a cold drink.
This entire area use to be old rail yards and warehouses back in the late 1970’s and then they held Expo ’88 here and it got a huge revamp. Following the Expo it then got repurposed into an urban parkland with swimming beaches and pools; restaurants; art centre; walking and biking paths and parks. The whole West End area is now being regentrified with multiple apartment blocks and yuppie markets and trendy coffee shops and high end restaurants.
Di lived in Brisbane in 1982 and then we lived here in 1993 and very briefly in 2003 before we headed to Canada and for us we have seen huge changes over that time. Not the big country town it use to be known as but a diverse city of two million people. Homes are still just affordable here and not out of control like Sydney and Melbourne.
This magnificent Bougainvillea vine was planted back in 2002 and now creates this amazing covered arbor of some two kilometres long which gives much needed shade in summer.
For Josef his day was about to get a lot worse. We had all subtlety mentioned to him that it was law to wear a bike helmet of which he preferred not to. We had been looking for one of those Lime motorized scooters that you can hire and after finally coming across one, Josef took the spare bike and rode with it to a docking station. His bike plus the spare had helmets in the basket of which neither he was wearing so when the bike police caught up with him he was liberated of $130. All in all a very expensive day for poor Josef.
We each had turns on the scooter realizing that none of us were as young as we use to be. Lots of people use them as a form of commuting which is cool. We saw this dude in a suit with his briefcase cruising off to work.
Once we had spent all of what was left of our middle age energy we headed back to have a quick swim and change to head out for dinner. We went to the swanky Boatshed at the Regatta hotel which we can see from the apartment balcony but alas would either have to swim across to it or get an Uber. Uber won out.
Nick went all out for his birthday and got a T bone steak of which all eight of us gave him permission to use his fingers. Excellent evening with great company. We got to catch up with Darren who is a good friend of ours and Nick plus our dear friend Linda who lives in Washington DC.
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