January 12

After many moons in Thailand and the US, I returned to Oz. Great memories in Thailand with my roomies and then home to visit loved ones, in which I gained a boyfriend. Long distance will be hard, so we'll see if we can weather it. I arrived at 8am, with my friend Hilary. She will be coming with us to Cambodia and Vietnam, and thus staying with us for the next 4 days in Brisbane. My call phone was out of batteries and it took about an hour to get our luggage, the whole time I was worried about charging my phone so that I could call Lina and see if she would be able to pick us up or not. Hilary got caught up by the drug dog, so I exited customs and tried to charge my phone. I ran into Lina who had been waiting for a while. So, we loaded the car with my bags and I waited a long time for Hilary. She told me she had brought food, because she has a pretty special diet, but you're not supposed to bring food into foreign countries! Apparently, she lied on the customs form and said she wasn't bringing in food, so hey made her pay a fine of $220!! Oh well!

Lina and Matt picked us up and we went straight to the grocery store because of the flooding in Brisbane, we needed to stock up on food supplies in case we couldn't get back out to a store in the next few days and in case we ran out of power. Got back, and then I pretty much set into veg mode..  I felt a little bad for Hilary, because there was nothing to do or see since Brisbane was so flooded. We watched the news which was non-stop flood coverage. Hilary walked into town with Jillian to pick up some more food. They walked around by Rosalie which was completely flooded and Lina also walked with her boyfriend to the river and reported how high the waters were. In the afternoon, Michael offered to walk with us and the dogs around the neighborhood and check out the floods. So, Jillian, Hilary, Michael's girlfriend Bronwyn and I all took off. We walked through some pretty deep, muddy ponds:

We walked to Michael's friend's house (Matt) and dropped the dogs off so we could get closer to the river. Matt dropped us off in his rape (bicycle) van, which was nice. The river was so high it was over the bike and walking path along Coronation Drive.

We walked back on the freeway, which was dead with no cars and over to Suncorp Stadium.

 

 

It was pretty bad to see all of the flooding. So we walked back to Paddington, got a drink at a wine bar, then took a cab home. Made some dinner, and then bed!