Tour of Brissy!

The 3rd largest city in Australia, a city of many bridges and a growing art and cultural scene...Brisbane was a very enjoyable city to explore. It is small enough to walk to all the major sights, but still has that large metropolitan city feel. We took the 25 minute train ride to South Bank Station and started our day by walking through the Parklands area, which is a long bougainvillea arbor path winding through gardens, parks and pool areas. The man-made pool area is pretty cool with a great view of the river and downtown. We saw a bunch of naked little toddlers running around and there's a nice white sandy beach area.

Grand Arbor

Shooting Water

Beach Lagoon Overlooking City

The Brisbane River winds through the city which is why there are SO many bridges (over 15 major ones to be exact)...so we definitely had our choice of where to cross to get to the main downtown city area. We walked across the Victoria Bridge and immediately came upon the Treasury Casino. We wanted to check it out and as we got to the entrance, the security guard informed us that we weren't allowed to enter because we had flip flops on. Whoops! Who knew any place in Australia had a dress code? We sure didn't.

View of the Parklands from the Bridge

So, we continued on and found ourselves walking through the Queen Street Mall which is full of shops and eateries. We found some tourist souvenir shops and did a little shopping for family back home. It's funny how each souvenir shop looks the same and has the same products...but if you go back and forth from one to another, you can figure out which has the least expensive kangaroo stuffed animal or aboriginal painted boomerang. We probably did look like crazy tourists going from one store to the next, then back to the first. Haha.

After exhausting ourselves shopping (not really), we took a latte break at a cafe called Coffee Hit. We sat for a while and people-watched in the King George Square area. We didn't see anything too interesting, so we continued on and walked down George Street towards the Botanical Gardens.

King George Square - City Hall

The gardens were nice, but not filled with flowers and trees like a lot of botanical gardens are...but it was still a very relaxing place and very busy with people walking/running on their lunch break. I was tempted to join the runners, but decided I better enjoy my snickerdoodle cookie first!

After finding our way out of the gardens, we caught a city cat ferry and decided to just ride on it until we had to head back to the train station (we had an off-peak ticket, so we had to be on the train by 3:29pm...or else:). We had a nice hour ride up and down the river and disembarked at South Bank to catch our train back home. It was a great day!

Really nice river house that I fell in love with!