We’re currently taking a chill day from four fulfilling days spent seeing Sydney. It’s already been 21 days of travel!
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Gold Coast (22 – 28 Sept)
So after bidding a sad farewell to Rocklea, Brisbane, we took a 2hr+ train ride to Gold Coast. On to our second leg of the trip! Booked a room through Airbnb at Surf Parade. The location was pretty alright; ~2.5km walk to Surfers Paradise. We enjoyed the multiple walks despite the heat/ cold (in a bid to save transport costs).
First day of settling down was spent exploring the neighborhood and of course, locating the nearest Woolsworths/ Coles.
Highlights in GC:
- Running at Surfers
- Fishing!
- Food Truck Friday
- I Screamed
- Steamboat Dinner
- Surfers Paradise Beachfront Market
Running at Surfers (23 Sept, Wednesday)
Back home I exercise at least twice a week and I couldn’t take not having any proper exercise after so many days. Glad to have a pal with me who’s into sports as well!
We walked to Surfers and did a short 20min run back to our apartment. Barely broke out into a sweat cause of the cold; body took some time to adjust to the running conditions. Though short, at least I made the whole body work out a little!
Fishing! (24 Sept, Thursday)
Robbie, our previous Airbnb host, was really nice and offered to meet come down to Gold Coast to take us fishing again! & of course we so graciously took up his offer. We wanted to catch fish! Most importantly, for me, I wanted to snorkel in the waters! I was honestly more excited for that. I do not have the patience for fishing.
Spent a day at The Spit, Sea World, again. Had heaps of fun despite almost catching fish, and changing fishing spots three times with hopes of getting something. BUT! We did manage to catch dolphins swimming in the sea! That was good enough for me. I really love nature and wildlife.
Checked out of Surf Parade on 25th September and we made our way to our next place in Labrador.
Managed to book an entire apartment for AUD46/night. Suh-weeeet!
Food Truck Friday (25 Sept, Friday)
Googled events to go to and Xiu Mei found this! Already the name sounded really cool! Headed out around 4++pm and caught a bus to Broadwater Parklands. There were so many people from the main streets walking to the venue!
Pretty cool concept of having food trucks around and a nice park nearby to eat, this coming from someone’s country which has a lack of funky trucks to buy food from. I felt that there were too many people, queue lines were way too long, and there were too little trucks.
We didn’t get any food cause nothing in particular was calling our name. We ended up going to a shopping center nearby and spent our time and money at K Mart and an asian grocer. Why did noone mention that things at K Mart are insanely cheap?!
I SCREEEEEEAAAAM!
Unanimous decision on giving a shot on making our own ice cream now that we knew how! Bought our ingredients at Coles earlier in the afternoon and since we were home early from visiting the food trucks, it was time to make ice cream!
We spent freaking three hours trying to whip the cream, from 9.00pm to 12.00am. We focused so much energy on the dessert that we eventually only had dinner at 11.30pm. Found out just yesterday that the reason why the cream wouldn’t whip was cause we bought LIGHT whipping cream and not the THICK version.
Whoops, my bad. All I wanted was to be a little more health conscious about my food decisions. That decision cost me three hours of my life.
Steamboat Dinner (26 Sept, Saturday)
Initially wanted to catch an event Opera at the Park back at Broadwater Parklands but we were sick of constantly revisiting same old places that we decided to give it a miss.
We had so much vegetables and potatoes to clear before leaving in a couple of days that we had a steamboat dinner!
Surfers Paradise Beachfront Markets (27 Sept, Sunday)
We’re a huge fan of markets, especially farmers markets. And though we’ve already been to Surfers twice, we had to go back to catch this market.
Only open on Wednesday, Friday, Sunday from 4 – 8pm, we actually went on Friday but to our horror they weren’t there! They cancelled the event in the morning due to safety reasons – strong winds. If we’d seen their Facebook post, we would’ve known.
This time we were smart and double checked to make sure it was ongoing. Soooooo, it was lots of handmade stuff and products. Not exactly what I was looking for (I was on the constant lookout for food). At least we paid a visit though!
Hurried on home after an hour there cause the skies looked threatening.
To Newcastle! (28 Sept, Monday)
We were moving on to the third leg of our trip – Newcastle, New South Wales!
NSW Trainlink has a promotion where if you travel between 16 September to 30 November 2015, train rides are only $70!
Xiu Mei found the deal and I guess we’re pretty lucky to be travelling during this period! Having the train experience instead of flying.
Will touch more on travelling to Newcastle and our shenanigans there in the next update.
Till then!
Bed for One 
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