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We arrived in Toowoomba yesterday after spending several days on the road up from Sydney, through Byron Bay, past Surfer’s Paradise, and spending a few days in Brisbane.

After receiving some bad news regarding a friend of ours we decided to clear out of the big city lifestyle for a while and head for the hills.

Just West of Brisbane, there is a state forest and a national park, which we spent the day driving through before we went to the city of Toowoomba, where we’ll be staying for a while.

A much more rural affair altogether, and a cheaper place to stay and/or live…

Will update the blog more thoroughly in the next week when we have a regular internet conection. At the moment, I am paying to use computers like it’s 1999, so this is just a quick notice to let everyone know what we are up to.

The other night we stayed at a place called Scott’s Head, NSW - in case you’re wondering, we did only go there because of the name - which is a little sea-side town. We enjoyed listening to their equivalent of Glastonbury with the other 30 or so people congregated on the sports field, and that night decided that we may not stay in Australia for as long as we had originally planned. More on this later too.

On the same night we met a couple who spend all of their working lives installing reed beds similar to that which Alf and Anna had just installed when we stayed with them in Melbourne, and I’m sure they were impressed by my knowledge of black/gray water recycling. We mentioned to them that the Victorian government would not allow its citizens to reprocess their own black water (essentially all waste water - including sewage - from a house - grey water is just that from sinks/showers etc) using a reed bed, they were astounded:

“it works best with black water” they both told me separately.

I’m sure Julian will be interested to hear that what he had told us was ratified in this way… Apparently, in NSW, reed beds can be fitted at will, and, more importantly, are a great way to recycle water for irrigating lawns/gardens etc using waste water. A Good Thing, then. Not to mention that the fitting of them is also pretty lucrative, by all accounts.

Another sound Aussie business model stored for potential later use.

I’m going to spend this evening writing some more conclusive stuff regarding all of the above, and more, as well as uploading all our photos ready to go online. We’ve seen ‘a heap’ of sights, in a pretty concentrated period of days: we covered nearly 2,000 kilometers in just 5 days.

As for Toowomba, apart from having a great name, it is also a much more relaxed and friendly place than we have experienced for some time. A perfect foil for the city lifestyle. Everyone says hello to each other. This is what we were looking for after living in Sydney for too long…

By the way, Toowoomba is in Queensland, and we spent last night watching the first state of origin rugby league game between Queensland and New South Wales. Queensland won. Happy days. Almost an omen, in my opinion…