While Mum and Dad were down, we went for a drive to check out the prize garden winners. It was a bit like looking at Christmas lights. The Reserve Grand Champion was by far the best garden, with a massive house and garden overlooking the range - they must be quite rich.

In addition to the prize gardens, the council does up all the parks around town as well.

On the Saturday morning there was a parade. The amount of people was insane, apparently the road up the range from Brisbane got backed up that many people came up from the city. Some of the floats were really amazing, they must have put a lot of time into them. Having previously worn the Ergon Energy Man suit in winter, I felt really sorry for this guy, it must have been stinking hot.

Last weekend was the start of the Toowoomba Carnival of Flowers. We bought 3-day tickets to the Flower, Food and Wine Festival so we could check out all the bands. Friday night was our first glimpse of the festival. It was sort of like a show with various art and flower displays, but nothing overly exciting. Other than that there was stalls selling garden stuff, and food stalls. One thing that was a very good set up was the wine stalls though.

Rachael and I are doing a fitness challenge on account of us being lazy in Brisbane and not playing any sport. We are also trying to eat better and lose weight, but my main goal is to start going for runs and ride to work again. I have gone for a few runs last week with Strava on, and it records your personal best times: My Strava Statistics Best 1k 00:04:28 Best 1 mile 00:08:52

So after finishing up my rotation in Brisbane, Rachael and I had a few days free to do some travel before moving up to Toowoomba. The drive down south almost started off slow, with a major accident on the highway, but we managed to use the traffic layer on google maps to take a massive detour that meant we didn’t have to wait for hours for it to clear and made it down to the NSW border without wasting too much time.

After Byron, we quickly stopped by Lennox Heads for a squiz, where we also good to see some cool wildlife. There was a group of sea birds swooping an area where you could see fish jumping. There must have been dolphins or something scaring the fish and the birds were taking advantage of it. From there we pretty much headed straight to our final destination, Coffs Harbour. Rachael really wanted to check it out since she had some work friends that had grown up there that must have given it rave reviews.

When you do a Google search for “Dave and Kylie” the top link is their website Dave and Kylie are getting married, so you know it must be an important event. I haven’t really been to a wedding before (not since I was like 10 anyway) and so I was kind of excited for the experience. Kylie works with Rachael at the tissue bank, and Dave is an electrical engineer so you know he must be a top bloke.

Tom scored us some cheap 3 park super pass season tickets from Energex, so Rachael and I hit up Sea World this weekend. Not too much has changed since last time I went there. They do have Emperor Penguins now, which were fun to watch. There is also now a Dinosaur Island, which I don’t see the relevance of in a water park but they did have some cool fossils. The main display had animatronic dinosaurs similar to Jurassic Park, but I was pleased to see there inside display had more correct displays where they were all covered in feathers and weird looking.

After the race. So on Sunday I joined Bully, Tom and Tim on a free Mountain Bike Orienteering Come and Try event. The other three boys have been really into the mountain biking of late and have done a couple of adventure races. Bully let me use his spare bike and we embarked on a leisurely 20km ride through the forest. As the start our expectation of a trail was very different to the makers of our map, and so we repeatedly rode past the turn off for the first check point.