Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Tag: Queensland

  • Australian Brewery Coasters

    Coasters Collected in the Wild (October 1997) Anyone who knows me understands that I like fine tasting beers. Naturally we had to visit brewpubs and breweries, and try as many different varieties as available. Lord Nelson The Lord Nelson Brewery Hotel bills itself as the oldest hotel in Sydney, dating back to the 1840’s (map).…

  • Brisbane at Sunset

    Queensland, Australia (October 1997) Next we flew up the coast to Brisbane, Queensland. We stayed with my wife’s friend who used to be her co-worker before she decided to move to Australia. However, I won’t post her name on the Internet because she might not appreciate it. We never would have gone to Australia if…

  • Atop Mt. Coot-tha

    Atop the Summit (October 1997) My wife and I rented a car, and drove the short distance from Brisbane to Mt. Coot-tha. An overlook provided excellent views of Brisbane. It also offered a convenient place to grab a cup of coffee. Later we drove out further to Mt. Nebo, then down through the Samford Valley,…

  • Noosa National Park

    Noosa Heads, Queensland, Australia (1997) We drove 160 km north of Brisbane to Noosa Heads on the Sunshine Coast. This town served as a gateway to the spectacular Noosa National Park with its rugged shoreline and abundant native Australian wildlife (map). Hastings Street provided access to the popular Headlands section of the park. We found…

  • Glass House Mountains

    Sunshine Coast, Queensland (October 1997) The Glass House Mountains became an easy detour on our drive back to Brisbane from Noosa Heads. Gently rolling plains surrounded the mountains which appeared to poke up randomly from the terrain. It’s not really a mountain range, but several volcanic plugs with the surrounding land eroded away. Our friend…

  • Tweed River & Mt. Warning

    Along the Water (October 1997) Our next adventure took us south of Brisbane, through the “Gold Coast” and Surfer’s Paradise, and back over the border into New South Wales (map). When we left Sydney earlier in our trip, New South Wales and Queensland were on the same time. However in the meantime, New South Wales…

  • Even More Ladylike Places

    Most readers probably anticipated that after slogging through Manly Places, Even More Manly Places, and Ladylike Places, that the next in this series would be Even More Ladylike Places. That seemed absolutely necessary in my mind to create symmetry and closure. However I’d written a variation on this theme already with the recently-published Ladysmith. I…

  • Random Islands

    Something needed to be done about the clutter. My list of potential topics grew to unmanageable proportions once again so I decided to keep pruning. I discovered an island theme as I sorted through the pile so I lumped a few items together. Nothing much unified them except that they involved islands with unusual twists.…

  • Surprise!

    A visitor landed on Twelve Mile Circle from Surprise. That was the actual name of the town; Surprise, Arizona. Maybe it shouldn’t have surprised me. More than a hundred thousand people lived there, yet I’d never heard of it. I also learned during my search that Surprise was a surprisingly common designation. Some 238 surprises…

  • The Only One

    I started playing a little game over the weekend using a search engine and the exact phrase “The only one in [name of a country].” Much of the time this query resulted in lists of exotic automobiles for some odd reason, or vacation properties with excessive hyperbole. More amusing results floated to the surface every…