Glasshouse Mountains

Bill Bryson described the "Big Things" phenomenon in his Australia book, so we were excited to add the Giant Pineapple to our list of giant objects to see.  This one had a bonus in that you can climb up to the top from the inside!  Very cool.

View of the pineapple plantation from the top of the Giant Pineapple:

Moving right along... to the Glasshouse Mountains for a fun day of hiking and trail running.  The playground at the visitor center even had tiny models of the mountains for the kids to play on (those dark humps in between the actual fun stuff).  Kind of the opposite of the "Big Things" motif:

At our first trailhead - a MTY DUK!

View of Mount Tibrogargan from our trail heading up Mount Ngungun - love the "pop up" mountain topography:

The trail up past a small cave:

View of the top of Mount Ngungun, with Mounts Beerwah and Coonowrin in the distance:

Mount Coonowrin (the lighter gray) is quite striking, as is Mount Beerwah behind it:

Checking out the land to the south:

It's just a little hike, jeans seem appropriate:

From the Glasshouse Mountains Lookout, a view of Mount Tibrogargan.  Our next run was a circumnavigation of this mountain on an excellent trail through the woods:

View from the top of Mount Beerburrum - it was great fun see these peaks from various vantage points, exploring the trails, and enjoying the nice weather.

The climb up to the top of Mount Beerburrum was a doozy!  Short but extremely steep.  And it was PAVED - probably the steepest paved trail we've ever encountered.  It's hard to get a good perspective on steepness (it always seems looking at the pictures later that we were just being wimps) so I didn't even try, just focused on breathing...

The view from the top was worth it, especially since we could climb partway up the tower:

There is a bit of solar here and there in Australia - and a lot of opportunity for more... hmm... (pondering our future work sites)

I didn't take any photos, but we stopped at the Abbey Museum and spent a couple hours studying the interesting displays that detailed a wide range of history in a very compact way.  Quite nice.

We finally made it to an island off the coast of Australia!  We had seen (and heard about) so many neat islands and places to vacation but didn't make the time/effort to get there.  You can drive to Bribie Island, and it has a couple caravan parks, so that's where we went.  Welcome to our first Australian island.

View of the ocean and a large container ship:

Jucy at the beach:

Almost to the southern end of Queensland!