Saying good-bye to the Gold Coast

We had a leisurely day on Sunday - we potted around the house during the
morning and Peter ensured that our load was ready for us to travel on
Monday. In the afternoon we took a drive down Gold Coast Highway as far as
Tweed Heads and then meandered back following the coast as much as we could.
The high rises are not only confined to Surfers Paradise and it's close
neighbours but now seem to spring up all the way down the coast. I wonder
what it will be like in a few year's time? Some of the original hotel and
motels are beginning to look very tired and I assume will meet with the bull
dozer before too long.

At Kirra Beach we went "house hunting". There was an open home for the
prize house for a RSL lottery so along with many others we wandered through
the house. Unfortunately it didn't seem to have the wow factor that I
thought it should have but of course if we were the winners we would be
delighted.

On the way back to Broadbeach Waters we stopped off and visited for half an
hour with Aaron and Michelle along with Xavier and Griffin. Aaron is
Peter's nephew and they are all having a holiday with Michelle's extended
family from New Zealand staying at a rental house at Mermaid Waters which is
a suburb very close to where we are staying. We had missed seeing them in
Melbourne in August so it was good to catch up briefly.

Next morning it was time to say good-bye to our little friend Saffron, the
teacup poodle and commence our journey towards Sydney. Now that we don't
have the caravan it has been a challenge for Peter to load all our gear into
the Patrol. We decided the safest way would be to purchase a trailer, and
after checking e-bay and gumtree we are the owners of a reasonable trailer
and the boxes are all packed on to it an strapped down. So we leave
Broadbeach Waters with a full car and a good load on the trailer - so
different from pulling the caravan. We plan to head to Coffs Harbour today.
We plan to either use the tent, cabins or motels on our trip to Melbourne
and by there by the 1st November which is twenty four days away. We also
received a call last night asking us to house sit for a couple with two
poodle shitzu dogs for six nights in the western area of Sydney - so we will
head to Sydney in time to do this. We have travelled the East Coast a
number of times so none of this area is new to us so we do not plan on doing
lots of "first time" sightseeing. We will break the journey twice on our
way to Sydney.