Day 1
Summary: Landed in Brisbane, rented a car, drove to Landsborough, explored the beach and Glasshouse Mountains, rested
Thursday, January 2nd
We landed in Brisbane at 6am and went through customs with no problems. They had a really cute dog sniffing all the bags.
We picked up our rental car and Greg drove off the lot on the left side of the road for the first time! It was a little scary at first, but he got the hang of it really quickly (probably all of his video game experience) as we drove the 1 hour north from Brisbane to Landsborough.
We stayed at an Airbnb near the Australia Zoo so we could get there first thing the next day. It was a room in a house that a couple lives in as well, and it was super cheap (only $40 USD!) She sent me a message asking what time we planned to arrive and I told her our plane landed at 6am so we would just be killing time until the standard check-in time. She graciously said we could come early so that’s what we did!
We got there around 7:30am, she showed us our room, and we showered. It felt so nice to shower after over 24 hours of traveling! We found a Target nearby, but as soon as we walked in we realized it was different from Target in the US. It was very small and only had clothing and a few home goods. Luckily, there was a grocery store in the same plaza where we got our snacks and 50 SPF sunscreen.
We brought our loot to Shelly Beach and made the mistake of putting on sunscreen after we sat down and got covered in sand so we received the added benefit of exfoliation while applying the lotion. It was messy but necessary because the sun is intense in Australia and our skin was used to winter (it was summer in Australia and New Zealand while we were there in January). We tried some of our snacks, including super yummy purple sweet potato chips seasoned with rosemary, garlic, and thyme. If you ever see them in a store, give them a try!
Around 1pm we had lunch by the beach and watched the interesting cars drive by. There were a lot of models we don’t have in the United States and practically every other SUV was equipped with the snorkel feature – I’ve never seen so many in one place in my life! It was warm and breezy and we didn’t feel too tired but I feel like we look fatigued in the picture we took!
After lunch, we drove around the Glasshouse Mountains. One of my friends had visited there while she was in Australia and recommended we check it out. We talked to the people at the visitors center and they gave us a map and a route so we drove around there for a bit. From the lookout you can see that the landscape is mostly flat land covered in trees used for logging with huge mountains just popping up out of nowhere.
We came back to the Airbnb around 4pm to rest which resulted in us taking a 3 hour nap. Our goal was to stay up as long as we could to try to jump right into the time zone and we did a pretty good job! I woke up at 7pm and woke Greg up so we could discuss dinner. We decided we would just skip dinner and get ready for bed since we weren’t hungry anyway.
We ended up sleeping until 7am! So we got a good 15 hours including the pre-bed nap. I did wake up around 5am and felt mildly awake but also tired enough to go back to sleep, which I did. When I woke up to use the bathroom in the night, I could hear lots of birds including a kookaburra! We love kookaburras so that was really fun and felt like a nice introduction to Australia for us.
Overall, it was a fun and relaxed first day in Australia!
Thanks for reading!
-Rebecca
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