Festival of Sails

We saw the Festival of Sails advertised in the paper. At Easter they run a sailing race from Brisbane to Gladstone, further up the Queensland Coast. The boats depart from Shorncliffe and at Redcliffe, a little further North but still on Moreton Bay, they sail round the headland on a beam (that's a sailing term, not a new method of propulsion) past Sutton's Beach where they hold a festival to cash in on, erm, celebrate the event.

So we decided to go up there and have a look. The weather was bright and sunny and actually pretty hot considering it's now Autumn and the past few days have been ropy to say the most.

We were on the road to Redcliffe when the radio announced to us that the starter pistol - or horn, more likely - had gone off and the ships were underway.

Predictably enough, parking was a nightmare, but eventually we found a little spot on a secluded side street not too far from the waterfront and walked at the snail-like pace of the eternally interested towards the beach, where we embarked upon an epic toddle up the boardwalk.

Pretty soon the first sails became apparent, gliding along about half a mile offshore, and as time passed a legion of boats sailed past. And that was that.

It took us about on hour to get up the boardwalk to the heart of the action where there was an arts-and-crafts market of reasonably epic proportions. We stopped off at a playground for a while and generally browsed around before we started to get tired (partly from the sun) and hungry and had to go in search of ice cream.

We procured phenominally expensive ice cream from a chip shop so it seemed rude not to wash it down with chips, so we did.

Then, increasingly irritatedly, we attempted to coax, cajole and finally bully Eloise to get her skinny white ass back to the car so we could go home and fall asleep.

Which Nicole did, blown away as she was by her red shoulders and neck, having caught the sun a bit too much.

However the sensibly-behatted amongst us soon recovered our joie de vivre and took the dogs out walking to the brook as the afternoon sun cooled and gave way to evening.