Lathams News: HOLIDAYS AND A ROAD TRIP TO BRISSIE

YAHHHHHHHH....
I am officially on holidays for the next five and a half weeks.... What a week it has been.... 1400 books catalogued with all the bits and pieces that go with that, stamped, and half of them covered already... along with all the rest of the end of year stuff you have to do in a Library... What a great bunch of co workers I work with.... I am feeling absolutely shattered....

Boxes of Books that I catalogues

Leveling them, writing on them and getting them ready to put into the Catalogue system

Entering them all into our Library Libcode System

Then the covering of them all.

Well there wasn't much time to get over the heavy workload as we were up very early the following morning to head to Brisbane for our grandson Max's 4th Birthday...

We didn't quite get away as early as we wanted to as we were both exhausted from our hectic week. We were on the road though by 5am and witnessed the most beautiful sunrise... What an awesome start to our day...

Sunrise....

Although the roads were very busy, we had a pretty good run all the way through to Gin Gin where we stopped for a toilet break and to refuel... We weren't there too long as we didn't want to waste too much time, as I was pretty keen to check out the Christmas Shoppe at Tiaro.

We have driven past this shoppe numerous time on our trips back and forwards to Brisbane but are usually in too much of a hurry to stop and check it out.... This time, presented a great opportunity to do just that. The fact that we are only a couple of week away from Christmas made it just that bit nicer to admire and enjoy the beautiful decorations...

We parked in the shade of a beautiful flowering tree that left the ground covered in a carpet of orange flowers...

Then it was a short walk up the footpath to the lovely Christmas Shoppe..

There seemed to be a few others that were heading for the shoppe and it was quite a hive of activity when we walked in...

Frosty the old snowman was on display out the front.....

Ready to check out a Christmas wonderland...

Even a letter box out the front for children to post their letters to Santa...

The insides were stunning... the most beautiful decorations and on a par with a lot of the beautiful decorations we saw in Europe last Christmas....

An Aussie Santa with thongs on his feet.... He belongs at the beach....

These delightful little elves...

These decorations were certainly not cheap, you couldn't buy boxes of them, all individually priced but they were the sort of decorations that you would buy one offs each year and you could build up a beautiful collection of Christmas decorations... Most were definitely not made in China either, a lot were hand made. You really could go overboard in a shop like this..

Their Christmas trees were magnificent....

The Christmas baubles were amazing, so beautiful and they ranged in prices from around $8 each to almost $50 or more.... Not the sort of baubles you would want on a tree that children could reach, but honestly some were really quite exquisite..

I bought this one for our tree...

They were selling some beautiful Christmas skirts for at the base of the Christmas Tree. Some of them were really lovely but at $100 each, we decided not to indulge. I think these would be beautiful if you had a room where your tree was the centre of attention in the room... We however, do not have a place like that at home...

Christmas Tree skirts....

The other decorations they had were beautiful glass decorations similar to the ones we have at home that came from Denmark. These ones are not quite as exquisite as the Danish one, and were considerably larger, but it is the first time I have seen glass ones here....

We did indulge and ended up buying two gold bauble decorations to hang on our tree... A little memento of our visit to the Christmas Shoppe... They were some of the cheapest we could find, but they are nice.

Then it was time to leave....

Our goodies came in a beautiful gift packet also..

We probably spent a good half hour or more admiring all the beautiful lights and decorations in the shop...

Tiaro is such a pretty little town and one I would like to explore a little more... I have only come to appreciate these little towns since we have been caravaning in the last ten years.... Their architecture and street layouts are quite beautiful. Tiaro is also an RV Friendly town and you can free camp here for up to 48 hours. The camping area is within walking distance to public showers and toilets...

We continued on from Tiaro for another 20 minutes or so and pulled into the Puma Service Station at Curra. Usually you can get fuel here a lot cheaper than elsewhere on the highway. It was a pretty good price here and we ended up getting it for $135.9cpl. This was considerably cheaper than the $175.5cpl they were charging on the Sunshine Coast and in Brisbane.

It was 11.30am by the time we arrived here, and we were both feeling pretty peckish so decided to stop and have a bit of lunch here as well...

Lunch stop

Hot chocolates

From here it was straight through to Maroochydore where we wanted to stop and get hair cuts. We often go to a little salon near the Big Top. They are very reasonably priced and you can walk in off the street and they will fit you in. We didn't have long to wait but whilst we were in there we could see a storm brewing.,...

We headed down to Kawana to the shopping centre there as we were going to meet my sister and Dad for a quick lunch (well they had lunch we just had a drink). It was nice to catch up with them since we hadn't seen them since August...

I am so thankful that we got away early this morning, as we were just ahead of a massive storm that hit Noosa and Yandina. We could have very easily been caught in it and I can't begin to imagine the damage it could have done to our car as they had hail like this...

We seemed to avoid it all until we got to the Gateway Bridge in Brissie. By the time we came off the bridge the rain hit us in full force. It was torrential, you could barely see 50 mts in front of you which was a little scary as we were on the motor way and there was no where for us to get off the road...

Fortunately by the time we got to Rochedale, the worst had pasted and it was just rain again. We were fortunate there were no accidents, but rain just literally poured out of the skies. Around where Chloe lived the roads were covered in water...