Toowoomba Carnival of Flowers 12-15 September, 2021

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Day One - Scarborough - Toowoomba

Our third adventure is a 3-night stay in Toowoomba for the Toowoomba Carnival of Flowers (TCOF).

We hit the road about 9:00 a.m. and drove directly to Toowoomba via the Gateway, Cunningham Highway and Warrego Highway.

Once in Toowoomba our first stop was the information centre for some maps and advice on what was happening during our stay. The information centre was very busy, which meant there would be a lot of people around for our three day visit.

Loaded up with information from the volunteer staff at the information centre, we drove to the Picnic Point Lookout for the beautiful views and where we had a reservation for lunch in the restaurant.

I had a very nice chilli prawn salad with fennel dressing while Meg had her usual Barramundi, chips and salad.

With no other plans for the day we headed for the Toowoomba Motor Village campground, where we had a powered hardstand site booked for three nights. We chose a powered site with mains water to test that those systems work ok. The site also had a drain pit for the grey water, which was a bonus.

We had a lucky heads-up from a man on the site next to ours, warning us that the mains water pressure was dangerously high and not to turn it on full bore. He was in the process of replacing a blown water gasket in his caravan at the time.

We were quite tired from the day’s exertions so chilled for the remainder of the day.

Day Two - Toowoomba

Had a great sleep in our very comfortable warm beds and rose about 7:00 a.m.

We had a leisurely start to the day with no rush to be anywhere at a particular time.

Meg had planned a walking tour of some public parks, and we set out around 9:00 a.m. to see the first of these, which was the Laurel Bank Park about 3 kms from the campground. After walking the first couple of kilometres under overcast skies before the sun made a late appearance, we realised that we’d forgotten our hats and sunscreen! We decided to carry on with the original plan and visit some shops at the earliest opportunity to buy cheap hats and sunscreen.

The walk to Laurel Bank Park was quite easy, much of it running along footpaths beside creeks/waterways away from busy roads. The park was full of spring flowers and it had a dedicated scented garden for blind people. The displays were amazing, including one part that had a dinosaur theme that required climbing up onto a viewing platform to fully appreciate.

The next stop was the city centre, about a kilometre walk away, to buy hats and sunscreen. We ended up at the Grand Central shopping centre where we purchased sunscreen from a pharmacy, and hats and a new shirt for Meg from K-Mart.

We were quite thirsty by that time, so we stopped off at a cafe at the shopping centre for milk shakes and chocolate chip cookies to refresh before continuing our journey.

From the shopping centre, our next destination was Queen’s Park, which was about another kilometre walk.

Queen’s Park was fairly unremarkable from the entrance we used, with a small display of flowers and a fountain display. We headed up towards the Botanic Garden section, past some wonderful, huge old trees, one of which was a QLD Kauri that is one of the tallest trees I’ve ever seen.

The Botanic Garden section of the park had many beautiful, brightly coloured displays of flowers, and hundreds of people viewing them. This was the week before the main part of the carnival, so we hated to think how many people would be there the following weekend.

There’s only so many flowers one can view in a day and we decided we’d reached our limit by this point, which was verging on lunchtime.

We walked back through the park to the city centre looking for a suitable lunch option.

We had previously walked past the old post office building and not noticed that it included a cafe and bar, the GPO Bar & Cafe, so this time we went in to look at the menu and decided to eat there. Meg went with a salt and pepper squid salad dish, and I had their “Naked Chicken” with rice and salad dish - but alas they had no rice, so I got extra salad, which was ok with me.

After lunch we were all tuckered out from the day’s exertions and decided we wouldn’t make the 3 km walk back to the campground, so we cheated and got an Uber for about $10.

Our afternoon was spent doing not very much, checking out one or two things around the motorhome, showering, catching up with games/communications/internetty things and drinking wine and beer, which is how afternoons should be spent!

Our dinner plan was spag bol, which we’d brought from home, and which was as yummy as always.

Tried to watch the ABC News but the reception here is crap so we gave up on that idea and had an early night.

Day Three - Toowoomba

Today we had a 3-hour TCOF Sightseeing Tour that left from the Information Centre at 9:00 a.m., so we had to be up at a reasonable time.

I’d set the diesel heater to come on at 6:30 a.m. because the overnight temperature was supposed to be about 7 degrees, and for the first time finally got the heater to come on at the right time!

After hot drinks, breakfast and cleaning up we set out for the Information Centre. Our original plan was to walk the 3-4 km there, but the day was very cold and there was an extremely strong, cold south-west wind, so we chickened out and got an Uber instead.

We got to the Info Centre about half an hour early and went through the usual wait to board the bus routine, and wait for the old farts who were running late, then took on some people who hadn’t booked and who had to wait to see if any booked people didn’t turn up - boring! We are always amazed when we do any activity like this that there are so many disorganised people out there who couldn’t arrive at a meeting point on time if their life depended on it.

Despite all this drama, the bus (a 20ish-seater Coaster) left shortly after 9. The driver, Lindsay Booth, drove us around some of the more notable areas around Toowoomba, such as the valley where the properties are $1,000,000 just for the land, never mind the price of the house!

Lindsay had been living in Toowoomba for about 40 years and was very knowledgeable on local history, indigenous people, European settlers and geography.

We were familiar with one of the places we drove around, but didn’t stop there thankfully, which was the Picnic Point Lookout where we had lunch when we arrived in Toowoomba on Sunday.

The tour included stopping off at three private houses to admire their gardens. By this time we’d seen most of the flowers that are grown around Toowoomba at this time of year and, while the displays were amazing, we were pretty much seeing the same flowers and plants at every place. One private place we went to was the home of a 90-year old lady who had an amazing garden that she looked after herself until recently, but unfortunately she had an accident and ended up in hospital. She had given Lindsay the keys to her garage that allowed us access to her backyard, which was a steeply banked yard absolutely full of wonderful flowers. No space for any weeds to grow in that garden!

After more driving around the suburbs, our next stop was the USQ Japanese Gardens. This is a wonderful example of a Japanese Garden, however we were feeling the cold and didn’t enjoy it as much as we normally would.

Our last stop was another place we had visited the previous day, the Laurel Banks Gardens. We really just walked around a bit trying to find a sheltered spot in the sun and out of the cruel wind until it was time to board the bus again for the final leg back to the Info Centre.

Meg had ordered a lunch charcuterie box a couple of weeks before we left home, from the Urth Cafe, that we planned to pick up and take to a park to eat. However, because it was as cold as a witch's tit we scrapped the picnic plan and decided to find something else for lunch and keep the charcuterie box for dinner.

We got an Uber to take us to Urth cafe so we could pick up the pre-ordered food, then get the Uber to take us back to the campground where we would figure out something to eat for lunch. But, when we got to Urth Cafe, the food wasn’t ready and was going to be another twenty minutes. We decided to cancel the Uber and have lunch at Urth Cafe, then get another Uber after lunch to the campground.

I had a nice chicken caesar salad and Meg had nachos, which I had to help her to finish. The ride back to the campground was thankfully uneventful.

I was running low on red wine supplies, and we wanted some bread for our morning toast the next morning, so I went for a wander along Ruthven Rd to the nearest Bottle-O for wine and the BP servo next to the campground for bread.

It was way too windy to sit outside for the afternoon with the awning out, so we spent the afternoon chilling in our little house.

Dinner was the charcuterie box we’d purchased earlier, washed down with some beer and wine.

Once again we attempted to watch some TV news but with mixed results. Unfortunately the commercial channels seemed to have better reception than ABC, so given our hatred of ad’s we didn’t persevere too long with that.

The overnight temperature was forecast to be even colder than the previous night, 6C, so I set the heater to come on earlier, at 6:00 a.m, to make sure it would be nice and toasty when we got up.

Day Four - Toowoomba - Scarborough

The forecast overnight temperature of 6C was correct, but thankfully the heater came on as programmed.

We lazed in bed until 7:00 a.m., before getting up for our usual routine of hot drinks and toast for brekky.

After breakfast it was time to pack up and prepare for the journey home. Even though this was only our third time out, the departure process seemed a little easier with both of us sharing the many tasks that need to be done before a wheel can turn. We were all done and ready to hit the road about 9:00 a.m.

Before we left home for this trip I’d researched public weighbridges in the Toowoomba area and found one about 25 km to the west at a servo in Charlton, which wasn’t quite on our way but I was keen to check our weight again. See Don't Mention the Weight! for the results of our second weigh.

With that weight off our shoulders (no pun intended) we drove to a planned stop on the way home, which was the Spring Bluff Railway Station.

Spring Bluff Railway Station is a heritage listed site located on the main railway line between Ipswich and Toowoomba. Its significance stems from 150 years of railway history and the attraction of its beautiful landscaped gardens. We wandered around the old station looking at the displays of old equipment like a room of track-changing levers and taking photos of the historical displays and the many flower displays. I did the short 10-minute walk through the bush around the bluff, while Meg enjoyed sitting in the sun.

Leaving Spring Bluff we decided to drive as much of the Lockyer Valley Cobb & Co Tourist Drive as possible on the way back home, avoiding the highways where possible. One reason for doing this, apart from wanting to see towns we hadn’t seen before, was that we wanted to find a nice lunch stop in one of the smaller towns we would pass through.

Driving through Grantham it was hard to believe the town had been devastated by floods in 2011, because there was no water to be seen anywhere in any of the creeks and river beds.

We got to Laidley close to lunchtime, so parked up Matariki and wandered along the main street looking for sustenance. We came across a lovely small florist and tea rooms that was filled with antique memorabilia, and that had yummy looking food, cakes, chocolates and desserts. Meg had a toasted sourdough turkey sandwich and I had frittata with salad. Both meals were excellent and, for once, were actually a good lunch size and not the huge meals that some establishments serve up.

Back on the road we stayed on the Warrego Way (tourist drive) for a while then eventually ended up on the Warrego Highway, Cunningham Highway, Gateway etc. back to home, arriving around 2:00 p.m.

We went directly home, and not to storage at Rothwell, because Matariki was due to have her 1,000 km the next day.