March

This past weekend we had friends to dinner. Dale plays golf with Dave, and Ria and I are starting a fortnightly knitting group starting this week.  I made US lasagna with Aussie ingredients...sigh. They do not have mild sausage at the grocery like I'm used to, so I bought their version of pork sausage. It doesn't break apart...it was cooking in strips although I took it out of links. So I had to dice it up.  The mozzarella seemed a little funky also.  However, it did turn out good, if different.

Saturday we got a late start to Mt. Tamborine with Bill and Colette.  It's a National Park made up of rainforest and considered the most developed region of the Gold Coast Hinterland and also made up of smaller parks.  We went to Witches Falls which is  Queensland's first national park.  Beautiful....  They also have wineries there, but we just made it to one wine tasting before they closed.  Great wines at this winery called, Witches Falls Winery.  Clever name, huh?  They are the only winery that actually makes their wine on site on this mountain.  It was a very quaint place with the Ivy growing over the doorway and the rustic decor. We would have taken more pictures, but like I said we just squeaked into the door as they were closing.

We asked about where to have dinner and they all agreed that The Old Church was the place to go. So they called in a reservation and said we were on the way.  We Americans tend to eat earlier than anyone else here. I don't know why, but we do. So although there were cars in the parking lot, we were the first ones there and come to find out from the hostess who was surprised to see us this early, they weren't even open yet!  She was very nice and seated us on some sofas at one end of this large dining room and gave us a bottle of wine from the Witches Falls winery to pass the time.   For dinner we had Atlantic salmon, risotto, duck, scallops and veg.  The portions of these four meals wasn't a lot, but oh so good!  We all split a chocolate parfait and chocolate tart for dessert.

On Sunday Dave, Dale and James were up and out to play golf at 5:30 am. Very wet on the course since it has been raining here for 3 1/2 weeks straight.  The weather has cooled down and we just passed their first day of fall a week ago.  Nice, but wet.