mount tamborine - day four part II
since we started the day earlier and we didn't get lost finding natural bridge (arch), we had plenty of time to explore the other 'touristy' stops nearby. we had no particular destination in mind but my dear friend who visited us on day 2 (the one who brought us lots of yummy seafood) did mention that the flowers in the botanical gardens on the mountains shd be blooming so we decided to check it out. along the way, however, we made several pit-stops... 1st up was Mount Nathan Winery - a small boutique winery that was apparent churning out winners - several of their wines won gold medals in competitions and their secret? additive free honey extracted from bee hives established on site, resulting in some rather unique wines. while dh was busy tasting the wines, i took claire to check out the sheeps that they reared on their premises...
and also sang her 'baa baa black sheep' to help 'associate' the song with the animal (now she keeps singing 'baaa baaa baaa baaa'...). a huge dog next door started barking though and frightened claire - she started crying and whining so i quickly brought her back into the wine tasting area. by then, dh had already bought a few bottles and was given a bottle of honey free (the taiwanese sales lady asked him to give claire a little bit of honey every day!?!)
st bernards shopping centre - 'cept that its nothing like the shopping centers that you and i know. there's only 1 tiny shop there (that was opened - we peeped into the windows of other shops that were closed but couldn't figure out what they sold) but this little shop did sell quite a lot of things and mostly importantly, it sold FOOD, so we decided to stop here... what we had for lunch...
a hamburger for me (that was HUGE, by my standard - it was almost the size of the plate that it was on but probably normal sized to the aussies) and fish & chips for dh as well as a vanilla milkshake to share. claire had rafferty garden's baby bolognese with macaroni, and stole some bites of chips from us. the nice shop owner gave me a bowl of HOT water to warm up claire's food!
after lunch, we continued our drive around the area. back home, its a challenge to have claire remain seated in the car seat even for 10 mins coz she absolutely hates to be strapped up - so imagine what we had to do over there - i practically sang till my voice is hoarse... here's claire doing the actions for 'head, shoulders, knees & toes...'
fortunately, she fell asleep after a (long) while... we located the botanical gardens and i jumped off the car to do a 'quick tour' and snap a couple of photos -the flowers already bloomed though.
we also came across 'the nut shed' on the way and made a quick stop to buy some macademia nuts for the folks at home.
random shots on the journey back...
lovely view from the mountain
yours truly attempting a 'artistic' shot of the farm land...
we managed to locate a tyre shop on our way back to patch the tyre and it costed us only A$10 vs the A$30 - A$35 that we'd have to pay the rental company if we choose to return the car with the punctured tyre.
lil' princess continued sleeping all the way... 
until we reached harbour town to buy more nike (in order to claim the tourist tax :P) and also food for dinner (we were expecting some friends to join us for dinner)... i'm sure she was pretty tired!
ps: noticed that it was not raining at all? God is great, isn't He? He took such good care of us! it only rained while we were in the car!
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