EC-Rider Travels

Wednesday was a bit of an admin day though in the afternoon I had a lovely time watching ballet class at McDonald College, thanks to Sarah Dehn and her lovely friend Lindsay. McDonald is a vocational school for the performing arts and some sports. A number of students have come from McDonald to The Royal Ballet School and Nicky the teacher taking the class, went all the way through the School and danced with the Company so we had a good ol’ chat. It was lovely to get another injection of ballet. In the evening a friend of Amanda’s came for a drink so the chat continued!

Today Amanda and I headed to Heron Island, a rather more complicated journey than we anticipated, as there are only ferries to the island on certain days and they are first thing in the morning. So it involved two flights, a night in a hotel and then a ferry tomorrow morning. With many flight cancellations, we cautiously booked an early flight to Brisbane which needless to say left on time and meant a few hours in Brisbane airport before our connecting flight to Gladstone.

So here we are in Gladstone, it is a little different from Sydney! Not a beauty, and according to our taxi driver, home to approximately 35,000 who work in export, refineries, chemical plants and the cement works. We checked into the Mantra Gladstone hotel and being a Thursday evening, decided to hit the town! We had spotted a Thai restaurant who we called to book but told it would not be necessary, as indeed it was not. We had the funniest time … drinks first up… sadly G&T was off as no tonic, rosé off, only one white wine, a sweet sparkling one and so resorting to beer, a Peroni was off too – so it was LLB (Lemon, Lime and Bitters – delicious). Asking for salt and pepper was also problematic and when it eventually came, I was rewarded with rice – obviously intended to keep it dry, but unfortunately the holes were big enough to let it through – it made quite crunchy pad thai! Just as we were thinking about a pudding we were told by our waiter that they were closing and could we leave – it was 8.15 after all! We soon realised why as we then met him in the bottle shop!