We rocked up in Brisbane a couple of days before new years. We spent a day or so fixing the car – buying and installing a new car battery and bonnet latch panel. The CB radio antenna also broke on Savannah Way but we haven’t fixed that yet. We spent a day walking around Brisbane City and Southbank and doing the Corona value test for Brisbane. The average price of a Corona stubby is universally accepted as the gold standard for measuring the living costs of a city. In Brisbane CBD we found the average price of a Corona to be around $6.50. One place had $4 coronas on certain midweek specials. This compares to $10 average price in Perth CBD. We were impressed with the development in Brisbane – beautiful walkways, pedestrian bridges over the river, free inner city public swimming pools, heaps of pubs and cafes, free lounge chairs especially suitable for afternoon nanna naps, citycycle network of push bikes to get around and a big ferris wheel. Being from Perth, we’re not used to development.

Next day we took off for Noosa on the Sunshine Coast to celebrate new years. We’ll do a bit more of Brisbane next time we’re back. We celebrated new years at a friend’s house in Tewantin, one of the towns that makes up the Noosa region. They had some friends over as well as a few week old puppy to provide entertainment for the guests.

On new years day we went to the hilux to get some stuff out the back and the tailgate wouldn’t open. There was no resistance from the handle – you could feel that pulling the handle was not activating the latches to open the tailgate. After some prodding and poking with my custom made lock picking skewer, we managed to jimmy open the tailgate and pull apart the handle. A bolt had come loose – another corrugation victim. Did up the bolt, put everything back together and she was as good as new.