Brisbane – Long Weekend Trip – Born To Travel Australia

Queensland Footy Trip

At the end of last year my best mate, Phil, and his wife, Dorothy, retired to the north of Brisbane from Melbourne. They kept asking us when we would come up and visit and see their new house which they had had built in the suburb of Newport. We suggested we would see them when we came up with our caravan during the winter. Phil suggested we should come up sooner for a long weekend when our football team, the Melbourne Demons played the Brisbane Lions. We are talking Australian Rules Football, not soccer or rugby. So we agreed and organised flights with Jetstar.

We arranged a late morning flight which gave us the two hours to drive up from Dromana to the airport and park before our flight.

Two and a half hours later we were in Brisbane, meeting Phil who came out to Brisbane Airport to pick us up.

That afternoon and evening we checked out their new house, chatted, ate and drank and generally had fun catching up.

The next morning we took their dogs for a walk. Spotted this lovely Golden Penda in flower

and this not so good looking cane toad.

We drove to nearby Scarborough for lunch. Enjoyed our meals and lots more chatting.

On the return trip we stopped in the adjoining suburb of Redcliffe. Now I’m showing our age a bit here, but when we were younger one of our favourite bands was the Bee Gees. Their family migrated from England to Australia. In recognition of their musical achievements a ‘way’ has been named in their honour in their hometown suburb of Redcliffe.

This is a statue of them as youngsters

and here they are as adult performers.

We couldn’t resist having a snap with them!

Here’s a few more photos showing some of the photo and information boards detailing their lives and musical careers.

That night Phil drove us into the footy. We parked at a shopping centre car park and walked about a kilometre to the ‘Gabba ground for the game. Cricket lovers would know the name too.

Dorothy isn’t that keen on football so it was just the three of us. Here’s a selfie of us in our seats only four rows from the front.

The players came out to do a warm up before the game.

There was also an impressive fireworks display.

Here’s our team coming onto the ground ready to run through the banner.

Sadly, early on Brisbane played much better and by half time things weren’t looking good for us.

We hoped the coach had revved up our team at half time. Here they are running out for the second half.

However we continued to underperform but in the fourth quarter the most bizarre thing occurred. We heard a loud explosive noise followed by all the lights on three of the four light towers going off.

Amazingly we were sitting in the one quarter of the ground where the lights were still on.

Time went by and when it became evident the lights weren’t coming back on soon the players left the field. At this point we were behind 51-81 sadly.

However after about half an hour the lights were restored and play resumed after a brief warm up period for the players. Amazingly Melbourne was rejuvenated and dominated play. However it wasn’t quite enough. We ended up losing by eleven points, 14-9-93 to 13-4-82. In Aussie Rules footy you score six points for a goal and one point for a behind. When added up you have the total score. Here are the Melbourne players leaving the ground at the end of the game. The delay certainly made it a late night.

The next morning we had a late breakfast followed by a walk with the dogs on a different route.

Lots of Australian native flowers to see.

That night some other old friends came over for a barbecue dinner. Again, lots of chatting, eating and drinking. So another late night.

About 2am I was awoken when my mobile phone pinged. Not happy to be woken up and even unhappier when I read a message from Jetstar telling us our flight the next day was cancelled! The next morning Karen and I discussed our options and decided to take the offer of a late afternoon flight with an opposition airline Virgin. Not sure how that worked but we didn’t have to pay anything extra, just had to put up with the inconvenience. Phil kindly drove us to the airport. Here I am sitting on our return flight to Melbourne in the very back row!