Tales of the Subaru - Northbound 2018

Welcome to Queensland - but not rabbits!

With all creatures and gardens attended to and the house moderately organised we left Jan and Tony in charge and turned DeDe the Subaru northward for a ten night sojourn to four different places: Armidale, Caloundra, Coolangatta and Port Macquarie.
 

Scone Tucker Tip #1

Under no circumstances whatsoever should you stop at the Scone McDonald’s!  The food is the same as every other Maccas but the place is full to overflowing with loud bovine women and even louder bovine children who only occasionally come up for a brief gasp of breath between screams and stuffing down McHappy Meals.  Each tribal group was accompanied by a nanna who was generally skinny and terribly weathered but did her very best to satisfy and calm both her daughter and grandchildren albeit in a terribly wan kind of way.  The nannas all looked to be in their 80s but I doubt that a single one of them was older than 60.

Scone Tucker Tip #2

If you think Scone might be the place to enjoy a Devonshire tea think again.  I've tried numerous times over the years and there's not a single scone to be found in Scone.

Armidale

Returning to New England always feels like coming home.  I did seven years of undergraduate and post graduate studies at UNE, living in one of the university colleges for the first four years and I love the place.  When we hit the tableland proper, about 20km south of Armidale, and saw that big sky I felt a little bit emotional.  Many’s the afternoon I kicked back in front of my window just gazing out at that sky for hours on end which is why so many of my assignments and much of my exam preparation involved pulling all-nighters.

Our first stop was just west of town to drop some cliveas off for my old college mate, Sheree.  We haven't seen one another since 1978 - a full 40 years come November - but everything fell right back into place.  We continued on the following evening with dinner at PJ Thai which I've raved about on past visits but it's gone to the pack.  The food was shit but the catch up with Sheree was wonderful.

Glenn & Sheree

Armidale Tucker Tip #1

Breakfast at Booloominbah, which is the magnificent old country gentleman’s residence that was the original New England University College of the University of Sydney, is a must-do and the best $10 you'll ever spend.

Breakfast at 'Bool'

When the university first began ‘Bool’ was all there was.  Students lived, learned and ate there.  The grand old house has had many incarnations over the years.  When I was there it was used as an admin building but it has since been restored to something approaching its original state with the eastern section and upstairs used, as they were in my day, as vice-chancellor’s offices and university council rooms but the western downstairs is now a restaurant and bar.  It's all good!

Booloominbah

We also had the pleasure of catching up with old friends Shara and Tom.  We enjoyed our traditional evening at the Armidale Bowlo with pre-dinner drinks at the same table as last time and dinner at the exact same table in the restaurant.  I even had coconut prawn again!  Unlike PJ Thai, the bowlo is reliable!

Onward to Esk

I decided on a rather roundabout route to Caloundra so as to avoid driving through Brisbane.  This took us north to Tenterfield through some beautiful country then across the border to South-Eastern Queensland’s Granite Belt where the New England Highway continues, but not as it did in New South Wales.  We have a cracked windscreen to attest to that and were only doing 60km/h at the time.  Better the windscreen than us!

All that was forgotten though when we reached the town of Esk, the ancestral home of the truly amazing Kransky Sisters.  You won't be the least little bit surprised to hear that you can buy what Peter assures me is a rather nice cheese kransky at the deli counter in the IGA there but not being an eater of anything even remotely mammalian I can't confirm that.  My eating habits aside, the connection between the Kransky Sisters, actual kranskies and even Esk itself is completely lost on most Eskimos which is deliciously ironic.

The kranskies are just kranskies.

The ear is the legacy of a BCC & skin graft.

Caloundra
 

Or perhaps Caloondra as Thelma the sat nav insists on calling it.  I'm a bit of a tragic.  I wanted to return to the Gemini Resort were Kim, Annette and I used to come for our spring school holiday in the mid-80s back when we went under the names of Chazza, Drooghead and Kenny.  That was so long ago that we had three term years and naturally dark hair although I’m told I still have some of the latter on my back.

Management listened to my request and we were absolutely delighted to find ourselves on the 7th floor of the South Tower with uninterrupted views of the channel to Bribie Island and the ocean beyond.  A much more developed Caloundra than I recall sits at the distant third of our outlook where it presents as something of a fairyland at night.

Our view approaching low tide.

Caloundra Tucker Tip #1

Miss Hoian Vietnamese Restaurant at Golden Beach is worthy both your time and not too many of your dollars.  Their rice paper rolls are ordinary yet acceptable but their chicken, chilli and lemongrass as well as their green papaya salad with coconut rice are rather excellent reinventions of a pair of classics.

Caloundra Tucker Tip #2

This one’s in Golden Beach as well.  If you like Indian food give Dilon’s Kitchen a go, if only for their correct use of an apostrophe.  We had the Kashmiri Kofta which was unusually firm for kofta but once past the initial almond surprise it was excellent, as was their Prawn Molee.

The reason for aiming DeDe this far north was to visit our lovely Aunty Joan who has moved from independent living on the Gold Coast to a facility on Bribie Island much nearer to family.  She's enjoying the new arrangements and the staff clearly love her - why wouldn't they?  We had a wonderful catch up and went to lunch with her son Peter and daughter-in-law Mandy.  Meeting both was a first for me, Mandy a first for our Peter, and that was lovely.  We had an excellent seafood lunch by the water on Pumicestone Passage which would have earned itself a Tucker Tip had I paid attention to the name of the place.  A quick return visit to Peter and Mandy’s for Mother's Day celebrations on our way south saw us looking forward to next year's visit with Aunty Joan.

Peter B, Glenn, Aunty Joan & Peter T

Aunty Joan, Peter B, Peter T & Mandy

 

And speaking of names, you may have noticed both Peter and his first cousin Peter share a name which would normally be a bit weird but our Peter is Peter Lyle, known as Lyle to family, not Peter, so the name was technically free for reuse.  Now the part that I've never quite got my head around is the transition of Lyle to Peter around the time he started with the National Parks and Wildlife Service.  I like to think it may have been an attempt to escape a criminal past but now that his memory is shot I'll never know for certain.

Look what they've done to my coast, Ma!

We tried to drive north along the coast but there's has been so much development in the 42 years since my first visit that it can be difficult to find in places.  Beautiful Mooloolaba beach now has a density of development directly behind it, a cheek and jowl wall of 20 storey apartment buildings with smart cafes, restaurants and boutiques below.  Al fresco dining had conquered all with super smart pavements and equally swanky car parks but it's all just too new millennium perfect and there's way too much of it.  The Sunshine Coast used to be low rise and friendly.  Now there are generic malls, high rises and every kind of business you can imagine.  And cars, everywhere cars!

Noosa Heads, long the jewel of this coastline still looks good though and its heart, Hastings Street, has remained low rise but designer low rise.  The streetscape is impeccable, with coordinated stonework, plenty of seating and seriously smart street plantings but it's absolutely rotten with designer label shops - and turkeys.  Yes, the brush turkeys have discovered Hastings Street, Noosa.  Dozens of them just wander up and down amongst all the Botox, tight faces and Prada.

The camping area at the end of the street where I stayed nearly 40 years ago has been reborn as a very smart rainforest park and picnic area which I do applaud.  It's a narrow spit between the ocean and the river and I don't think a disjointed camp ground was sustainable in the long term.

We scored another crack in the windscreen on the way back.  That's two in less than a week. Bloody Queensland!  Perfect windscreen one day, cracked the next.  Then cracked again!

Big bucket list tick: we visited to the Eumundi Markets which began as an informal local arrangement many decades ago but now it's a huge twice weekly concern in a purpose-designed and landscaped park that's a bit too much like an outdoor shopping mall for my liking.  A lot of the stuff is local which is great but it just goes on and on and back and forth. It's extremely well organised and spotlessly clean but lacks hippies or something.

I'm probably just old and jaded.  Or maybe I just have all the stuff I need - another nice piece of glass or a plant excepted.  We did pick up one more hibiscus at a small nursery on the way back - a red one with green and white variegated leaves.  That makes a running total of nine hibiscuses and one poinciana tree to carry home.  The latter probably won't even grow in Sydney but I've been fascinated by them since I first visited Queensland at the age of seven.

Coolangatta

That very first trip to Queensland saw us staying in what was then a reasonably good motel right opposite Coolangatta Beach and it's still there albeit with more of a focus on backpackers these days.  Well been there, done that, don't need to do it anymore!  We stayed in a very smart apartment at the Mantra.  The views were excellent and the balcony big enough for the chooks.  I could live there!

The reason for our overnighter in Coolie (as the locals so groovily call it) was to catch up with old friends Annie and Annie (Anstee and Green) as well as their husbands Peter and John.  The Annies and I worked together at Artarmon PS then Anstee and I again at Willoughby.  Old friends are gold and we had the best night out at a Thai restaurant in Tugan. 

I once did my level best to embarrass Anstee at a fashionable cafe in Mosman by turning up in a flannie, King Gee shorts and Uggies so it seemed appropriate to come strolling out of our hotel in similar shorts and the new pair of Uggs I bought in Armidale on the way up.  I teamed them with a smarter and highly predictable Hawaiian shirt this time though.

 

Glenn & Annie G

Annie A & Glenn

Tugan Tucker Tip #1 - do you like the alliteration?

Sticky Rice has the best and lightest fish cakes I have ever tasted - anywhere!  It serves up some other pretty impressive creations as well, their betel leaf prawns being highly worthy of mention.

I must have been there before but for whatever reason I'd forgotten about Rainbow Bay which is just around the corner from Coolangatta and the last Queensland beach before New South Wales.  If Coolangatta was Manly then Rainbow Bay would be Fairy Bower and it's glorious.  Go there but don't tell anyone else!

Rainbow Bay

Byron Bay Tucker Tip #1

We had an excellent seafood takeaway for two from Fishheads which is on the main beach across from the pub.  Local whiting, potato scallops, calamari and chips for $35 which we enjoyed in a park with a view.  They were overgenerous with the chips but the bin chickens saw to those.

Calamari Anecdote #1

Back in 2009 the BBC produced an excellent six part documentary series titled ‘A History of Christianity’.  One of the episodes was about relics and having grown up blandly Protestant that's something I knew very little about.  Suffice to say it's all pretty disgusting - bits and pieces of dead people in glass cases with lots of fuss made over them on certain prescribed days of the year.

They seem to have bits of just about everyone except for Jesus who you will recall took a Led Zeppelin like ‘Stairway to Heaven’ leaving behind naught bar a few fingernails but wait!  Jesus was Jewish; he was circumcised on his 6th day!  That discarded foreskin has some seriously powerful relic potential and no less that eighteen religious institutions across Europe claim to have it.

So the BBC set off to investigate the mystery of the Holy Foreskin and found that twelve of the eighteen gold and jewel encrusted caskets contained something that in fact might have been a 2000 year old foreskin which painted a graphic image in my mind of the mohel slicing it up like calamari and sharing it around.

That gave me something to think about as we battled the 200km of roadworks south of Ballina.  I know you have to break eggs to make omelettes but I wondered if they couldn't make one smaller omelette at a time before moving on to the next rather than cooking one extremely long one.

Coffs Harbour Must-do #1

Under no circumstances whatsoever are you to pass by The Big Banana.  It's iconic, it's the first of the ‘Big Things’ and they sell ‘Dicks on Sticks’ which are chocolate coated frozen bananas that come naked; with hundreds and thousands; or with crushed nuts.  I go with the nuts, of course!

Port Macquarie
 

I can't pass by Port without looking in on Noelene Bailey, the mother of my old university mate Dave who was one of the world’s kindest people and worst drivers.  He nearly killed us both just north of Grafton in 1976 and then succeeded in doing the same to himself about 10 years later.  Selfless as ever, he was school bound very early one morning to coach his netball team but failed to notice both a stop sign and a concrete mixer.  Vale Dave.

Noelene was pleased as always to see us and I was very pleased to see her.  We've been friends for 43 years now since she and husband John used to welcome me into their home on long weekends and university holidays.  She's not very mobile these days due, in part, to quite dreadful scoliosis but we managed a brief shopping excursion and coffee out which was a first.

Glenn & Noelene

As last time, we stayed at Waters Edge Hotel in Port Macquarie which really is on the water’s edge with a lovely outlook from the front rooms and at its just a block away from town it's a short walk to a dozen or more restaurants and a fairly easy stagger back.
 

Port Macquarie Tucker Tip #1

I've recommended it before and I'll recommend it again - the Oriental Spoon Korean Restaurant but it was sadly closed the one night we wanted to go and I'd already decided what we were going to order - bugger!  We went next door to the Indian which was fine but my mind was fixed on kimchi and chapche not mango pickles and kofta.

We made it home from Port in just shy of four hours which is something of a record for us but it's motorway all the way now with the only roadwork being around the back of Lake Macquarie where about 30km of both carriageways cracked and moved from Day 1.  Some say mine subsidence; some say shabby road base; but years of rumour has had it that the dismembered body of missing urban conservationist Juanita Nielsen is buried beneath that particular stretch of motorway so perhaps she’s just trying to claw her way back out.  Juanita was always difficult to silence.