Friday 24th July
The morning was overcast but at least it wasn’t raining so we made the most of it and headed out for a walk along the beach front and coastal path. It wasn’t long until the rain started up again though and so we headed back to Mark’s favourite cafe: Noosa Social. We have now determined what brand of coffee the barrista uses and I advised him of a quandary: that we don’t know if it’s the coffee beans ( Flying West) or his talent making the coffee so nice! So we have an experiment in place with him: We are going to buy some of the coffee beans and try making it ourselves at home. We told him we would be back in September and we would report on our findings 🙂
We had expected rain for much of the day and so we hired a car with a plan to head to Montville, about an hours drive, with a stop off at Kondalilla National Park on the way. There is meant to be a waterfall at the park and it should be in good flow given all the rain we’ve had!
The round trip trip to view the waterfall is about five km’s, about an hour, so off we set. It was quite a decent gradient down and then up and was a bit of hard work. I had to strip off multiple layers on the journey. I did note that every single other person we passed on the path had active wear on but this was one day I didn’t have my active wear on.
The waterfalls weren’t all that spectacular but at least it made for a nice bit of exercise on the day. We were lucky for this trek because once we got back to the car it started to rain again. Our plan was then to head into Montville and this was only about a 10 minute drive.
We scored a park in the little village with shops lining either side of the road. The shops on offer and setting were similar to Mogo on the NSW South Coast. We had a look around the shops and a bite to eat at this cafe that had ‘award winning sausage rolls’. The view from the cafe was award worthy so, hopefully, this will set a good standard for the food. The verdict is just in: the sausage roll was very nice and definitely worthy of some kind of an award.
After lunch we checked out another shop near the cafe when mark bumped into an old work colleague. By the time they finished catching up the rain was back and so we didn’t spend any more time exploring the many shops and boutiques lining the other side of the road. We decided to head out for our last stop of the day to to Flame Hill vineyard which is just a few minutes drive out of Montville. The restaurant at the vineyard offers nice views over the area but was fully booked for today so we might try this out on our return in September. The vineyard offers wine tasting: 6 samples for $6 and so we took this offer and tried their reds. They range in price from $25 – $45 with most being around $35 so are not cheap but they were all rather nice.
It was 3 pm by the time we finished our wine tasting and so headed home for the 1 hour journey. We decided to keep the car for another night and plan to visit Eumundi on Saturday. Dinner was at Miss Moneypenny’s where we had been last time we were in Noosa. The meal was ok but it isn’t somewhere I’d be rushing back to.