Warwick

Our next stop took us into Queensland - we didn't have any burning ambition to go to Warwick but it was in the right general direction. My husband has never spent any time there because it is only a couple of hours from Brisbane and he was always going through it to get somewhere more exciting. And I have never been anywhere so why not. 

Our airbnb was the bottom floor of an old 19th-century house that veered dangerously close to dingy. It certainly didn't have many windows. We went and got something to cook for dinner then came back to find it didn't have an OVEN. Just a microwave. A perfectly normal large, well set up kitchen, but no oven. We spent half an hour looking, in case we missed it, then gave up and ordered pizza. 

It was the night before the annual Jumpers and Jazz festival so everything was covered in crochet. Honestly you can't make this shit up, what is with small country towns and bizarre festivals. It did look like everyone was getting into it though. I hope my retirement small country town has something similarly odd.

In the morning we went out to Glengallan, which is an old homestead that had been built in the 1860s, had a brief heyday before everyone went bankrupt, then left to moulder until about twenty years ago when it was done up, but not entirely. Absolutely fascinating slice of history - Australia doesn't have a heap of fancy old houses and they tend to be either still extremely posh and you never get to see them, or full-on museums and not much fun. 

There was absolutely nobody there (the people shapes on the upstairs balcony are cardboard cut-outs, TERRIFYING) so we roamed around the rooms and the grounds, deciding we didn't want to live there and wondering how anybody could. That entire ground floor was two rooms and a hallway. There were some very good exhibits, and they'd left bits un-renovated, and run out of money on other bits, so just put in random furniture that local people had donated. Excellent. 

And then we drove to my parents in law in Brisbane, which was the whole point of the trip, these were just all side quests.