We had another lighter breakfast today and then we hopped on a bus over to the city and found the bus to travel to “The Summit” at the Mount Coot-tha Lookout.
Neither of us had been up Mount Coot-tha for many years and the restaurant is quite iconic. As the restaurant is in the Entertainment Book we thought we would have lunch and admire the view over Brisbane.
As I was looking up to see the menu and work out buses I came across news stories that announced that the restaurant is closing at the end of January after 36 years 🙁
Reading that news made it a no brainer visit. We had a lovely lunch of Pork Belly and Steak before sharing desserts or Panacotta and Chocolate Brownies.
200g Grass fed eye fillet Served w’ pan roasted chats, Dutch carrots, onion jam, spring greens, jus
Sadly the view was not the best today. Even though we do not have fires within 50kms of Brisbane, there was still a lot of smoke in the air.
After the bus, we caught the bus back to the city and back “home”. Once back in the apartment, we put a load of washing on and put it in the dryer and made our way up to the hotel pool and spa for a relaxing afternoon.
Our dinner plans were something a little different… At the restaurant at the Mantra, there is a “What’s On” Blackboard…
As you can imagine.. The Wednesday night “Flaming Cheese Wheel Pasta” aroused our curiosity. We asked and were told it is a half wheel of Grando Parmeganio cheese that has been hollowed out and pasta added. Apparently, it is all done at the table and has to be experienced. We thought we would give it a try.
We arrived at the restaurant and were shown to our table. Before long a trolley was brought out with the large wheel of cheese that had ( as previously explained) been hollowed out.
To create the dish, they flambe the inside of the cheese with Rose Water alcohol to make it all nice and “melty” before adding pre-cooked pasta (we chose carbonara). Rose Water alcohol does not flavour the cheese at all. The pasta was stirred through the cheese “bowl” and the bottom scraped to make sure we got all the molten bits.
The pasta and gorgeous sauce was pulled out of the cheese wheel and placed into a bowl, topped with more parmesan, crispy pancetta and copious amounts of cracked pepper.
The resulting dish was AMAZING!!!
This video is of the process being created for the lady sitting next to us..the same process was repeated for in front of us. (sorry the sound is not great 🙁 )
If you have the chance to visit “Salt Meats Cheese” on a Wednesday night .. do try this. The theatre of the dish alone is worth it.
We planned on a lighter breakfast this morning as one of our Christmas gifts from our “down south family” was a voucher for the seafood platter at a restaurant in SouthBank – YellowFin.
We have been to this restaurant before and it was on our list of places to eat for this trip. So having a free meal was a super bonus.
We had called in to book a table for 1:00pm and ask for a substitution of oysters as neither of us like them.
At 1:00pm we arrived and were seated at a table and served our included drinks. Before long the platter came out.. OMG it was HUGE.. We knew we would not be finishing it all 🙂
The platter had Hot and Cold Prawns, Hot Scallops, Battered Fish, Salt & Pepper Calamari, Spanner Cap, Moreton Bay Bug, Chips and Salad. It was all beautiful and fresh. We thoroughly enjoyed it and only left some chips and a bit of salad!!
After lunch we “wobbled” back over the road to our hotel to “recover” There would be no dinner tonight.
We watched a couple of movies and had another early night.
We slept in until around 7:30. After we had showers and a cup of tea, we went downstairs for our included full breakfast. The breakfast here is a buffet of cold meats, cheese, fruit, pastries, cereals, bread choices for toast, juices and hot drinks. As well as that, we get a choice of a hot breakfast from the menu as well.
After breakfast we, went back to the room, tidied up and went down to the bus stop and across to the Myer Centre to have a browse through some shops to fill in time before lunch. We are not really shoppers, so we headed toward the Treasury Casino to have a look and then get a City Cat Ferry up to Eagle Street where we wanted to have lunch.
We were standing at the traffic lights waiting to cross the road when we noticed a “City Loop” Bus. It said it was a free loop bus, so we thought we would take a ride. It was a pleasant loop around the city in air-conditioned comfort. Off the bus back at where we started, we had a look around the casino.
We headed to the ferry stop where there was a free “City Hopper” ferry waiting. We laughed that it seemed we were having trouble spending money today ” 🙂
We got off the ferry at Eagle Street and made our way to Massimo for lunch
The last time we were in Brisbane we had seen this restaurant and wanted to go on this trip. This is the view from our table.
After lunch we hopped on a city cat going downstream, so we thought we would go for a ride. We always enjoy travelling on the City Cat. There was a cruise ship docked at the Hamilton Terminal. It is always a sight to see these floating cities.
Back to Southbank and up to the room to cool down a bit. We planned on going out for dessert later on.
Next to the Mantra is San Churro and we had decided that was dessert.
Churros with Milk and Dark Chocolate and Chocolate Cake later and we went back to the room to “collapse”
For the next week, we are staying at the Mantra as previously mentioned. So I will split the holiday up as two trips. This post will be the final numbers.
Facts and Figures From the time we left home until arriving here in Brisbane we have..
Been away for 16 nights
Spent a total of $4227.59
Travelled 3464kms
Spent $233.60 on fuel, which breaks down to fuel usage of 4.33l/100km
Our $$ spent per day averaged at $264.22
Our $$ spent per km averaged at $1.22
Many “grey nomad” travelling websites have a dollar/km spend of $1.00 is a good budget to stick to. I am more than happy with our spend of $1.22
If we had chosen to cook all our meals ourselves we would have spent far less than $1.00. However, even though we enjoy cooking, we enjoy eating at “better” restaurants too. We do not tend to go out for a “Pub style” Meal often, as we are perfectly able to cook that sort of meal ourselves.
What went well…
I was pleased with how we packed the car. We had the Engel fridge on the back seat, along with a smaller car fridge. In the boot were our two suitcases, (plus for the first week a few bags of Christmas Presents)
The car fridge held just Milk, Eggs, Bread and a couple of small bottles of water. The Engel initially held the food we brought from home and then we kept it topped up with meat, vege, cheese etc along the way. This kept us with 3 days food in the fridge. To make it easier to unpack, all the food was in two eco-shopping bags this meant rather than hauling fridge in and out of the car, we only had to lift out the two bags. The food was going from the car fridge to a kitchen fridge. When we were leaving, we ran the car fridge for a while as we were packing up and the cold food was always the last to pack. This worked well, I had a small fridge thermometer and checked the temp regularly for the first couple of days until we were satisfied that we were not going to put ourselves in any danger of food poisoning 🙂
We packed our two large suitcases a little differently to usual.. In one case I had all our clothes. My clothes on one side and his on the other.
The other suitcase was packed with zip up insulated shopping bags which were packed as follows.
* “Bathroom” – All toiletries, medications, combs, brushes, hair dryer, shavers, toothbrushes and toothpaste. Dishwasher tablets and Laundry powder were also in this bag.
* “Electrical” – A powerboard with USB outlets, chargers for phones and Ipads., our Apple TV box and HDMI cable
We also packed our good medium sized non stick frying pan.
This configuration worked pretty well. It was easy to bring in just 2 suitcases. then the small car fridge and the food from the Engel.
I tried to book accommodation that had laundry facilities and was able to wash pretty much every 3rd day without having to pay for laundromats.
What didn’t go well…
Honestly not much. I could have done with an extra pair of socks and we forgot tongs 🙂 We did not bother to buy them along the way though, as most places had them. We did buy a set of flexible cutting boards, as many of the accommodations either did not have a board, or they were tiny or they were stone, so we decided that cutting mats were $5.00 well spent. I remembered pack swimwear for the Spa Pools at Moree, but forgot beach towels. Luckily we did have an old towel in the car so we did not have to take the white towels from the motel.
Why do we choose AirBnB’s? Over the years we have always preferred to stay in places where we can self cater as often as possible. Both of us prefer to have a cooked breakfast rather than cereal or toast, so motel accommodation has traditionally not been much of an option for us, as most do not have kitchens.
Apartment/Suite style hotel accommodation is often very expensive or has a minimum nightly stay of 2, 5 or 7days depending on the time of year.
Caravan Park cabins have been a good choice for many years and we have had lots of great holidays in these.
Then…..along came AirBnB 🙂 I admit I was a little cautious the first couple of times I used it, but the more I looked into reviews I became more confident. Now I am happy that it is a safe way to travel.
When I am planning a trip, I know roughly where I need to be staying, so my first stop is always AirBnB. You can search by location, then you use filters to narrow down the choices available. Firstly I always filter by “entire place” this means that we have a place to ourselves, not sharing a room in somebody’s house. Sometimes an “entire place” is a suburban house, sometimes it is a granny flat or unit within the grounds of the host’s house, but always you have the place to yourself with little or no interaction with your host. My next filter is to find properties with a kitchen, free off-street parking, air conditioning, WiFi and laundry facilities. This will usually give loads of options so then I will narrow the price range down to $100 per night. ( sometimes I need to raise this to $150 to get more suitable properties. Then I will compile a list of options to show hubby and we make a decision together.
We have never had any problems with AirBnB. They have always been clean and each host has been lovely. We have found that, especially in county areas, they are often cleaner and nicer than somewhat overpriced, rundown motels that have had little maintenance for years and are run by burnt-out despondent owners. Each AirBnB listing has a review section you can read and from I have read, AirBnB does not allow many bad reviews before kicking people out of the programme.
All in all, we have had a lovely holiday in comfortable accommodation with no regrets.
This was the last day of our “RoadTrip” The next week we have booked a room at Mantra. This will not be as much of a “budget break” 🙂 we love eating out at good restaurants, so the Entertainment Book will be used as much a possible 🙂 The package I booked is Room and Full Buffet Breakfast each day, so we are planning on having a big breakfast, later lunch, then light snacks in the evening.
As I mentioned in the previous post, Toowoomba is only a short drive from Brisbane city and knowing we could not check in until 2:00pm we were in no hurry to leave.
I wanted to travel back to Brisbane on the new “second crossing” of the Toowoomba range. Last time we were in Toowoomba, we had seen the construction works happening and were keen to see it finished. This new bypass should help keep large trucks out of the Toowoomba City centre.
We found the entrance to the new highway and it was funny watching the navigation system in the car having a little “panic attack” as the new road has not been updated to the system yet, so the car thought we were driving through a paddock and kept telling us to “turn around where safe”
We arrived at South Bank at just after 11:30am. We did not expect our room to be ready, but we knew that the Mantra would put our luggage into the storeroom and park the car for us. This left us free to have lunch at one for the many restaurants nearby.
We chose Ahmet’s Turkish. We have not been here before and were very pleased we did. It was really nice. We took our time and choose a couple of small plates as starters then split a main meal between us. We also enjoyed a couple of nice glasses of wine. Ahmet’s is in the Entertainment Book with a 25% off voucher.
After lunch, we were still a little early for our 2:00pm check in, so we decided to take a short walk up to Woolworths and buy some cheese and cold meats ready for a few light dinners. We got back to the Mantra and our room was ready, so we headed up to see our home for the next week.
We are members of the “Mantra Plus” programme so we get bonuses such as free Wi-Fi, food and bar discounts, late check out and often an upgrade in the room type. Of course, the upgrade is subject to availability but most times we have been upgraded.
When booking a room, I always book the minimum we are happy to stay in and if we get an upgrade it is a bonus. For a one week stay, we decided on a One Bedroom Apartment which gives a little more space than a Studio Apartment.
When we got up to the room, we had been upgraded to a City View Apartment, which gives us views over the roadway and city rather than looking out over the train line ?
We unpacked our clothes and sorted out the bathroom, then settled in for a quiet afternoon.
