It was another pretty sunrise that greeted me this morning, not so for Mark because he had already left for his bike ride. We caught up at a new coffee spot, Tarte, a cafe and bakery. We quite enjoyed the coffee here and is a lovely setting but is unfortunately right on the corner of the major Gold Coast highway. My walk home from morning coffee took me past the Wednesday 9 am session of beach Yoga which was very well attended.

The plan for the day was to go in and check out Surfers Paradise, and area we haven’t been to in probably 25 years plus. We set off at about 11 am and headed to the beach front area, near Cavill Avenue Avenue, to park. What a disappointment Surfers Paradise is now. It used to be rather polished and glitzy but now it is very downtrodden and scruffy. I suspect that most of the high end retail is now down the road at Pacific Fair. If I had to sum Surfers up, the whole of those few blocks fronting onto the beachfront, I would liken it to one great big $2 dollar shop. The few blocks around Cavill Avenue were rather empty of tourists but, granted, there wasn’t much reason to be there; just lots of cheap shops, a few grungy Irish pubs and some Chinese diners. It was very depressing. So we headed back to the beach front to try and find somewhere with an elevated view to have a bite to eat before heading home and ended up at Hurricanes.

We had planned to take the hop on-hop off water taxi through the canals of Surfers but the weather turned rather unpleasant and so we just decided to head back home,  and we would come back to take this on Friday, hopefully, when the weather was better.

We just hung at home for the afternoon but mark headed out around 4 pm to try another Craft Brewery joint near our apartment.

Dinner tonight was meant to be down the road at a Lebanese restaurant, Rabbath. However, neither of us were that hungry following our lunch at Hurricanes and so we moved our Lebanese dinner booking to tomorrow night and headed back down to the Burleigh Pavilion.

I can’t emphasise enough about how fantastic this complex is. We went back to the beach bar area, the casual dining side of the upper level of the building, and the place was a buzz of activity. This made us think what a waste of space to Bondi Pavilion has been all these years. So many people getting so much joy and use out of this building. We opted for the vegetarian nachos and this did not disappoint; it was the most generous serve we’ve ever had. After that, it was back home for another early night and some NETFLIX.