Not much going on in Brissie the first few weeks of December. I checked into City Backpackers after recovering from my illness. This was the hostel I stayed in when I was in Brisbane in August. It was nice to reconnect with a lot of my friends who were still staying there. Especially my Irish buddies Seb and Brendan.
I didn’t really do much during this time. It rained most of the time here and there wasn’t really an opportunity to get out and do anything. Just hung out and started thinking about what my plans for the future were going to look like. At this point, I wasn’t sure if I was going to stay in Australia for longer or if I was going to return home. I was just probing around trying to find different solutions. I was a bit confused to be fair.
We did make it out of Brisbane into the Glass House Mountains on December 20th for the Jupiter and Saturn conjunction. The two planets crossed paths in the night sky and they created one very bright looking star. These two planets cross paths every so often. But for it to happen in the evening is rare. It hadn’t occurred in close to 800 years so it was pretty cool to get out and see something like this.
My original plan for Christmas was to fly down to Sydney and meet up with my American friend, Carter. He has a car and we were going to do a road trip from Sydney down to Melbourne. Exploring the coast along the way. But just a few days before Christmas Sydney had a bad COVID-19 outbreak. Bad for Australia at least. So I had to cancel my plans because a road trip to Victoria became impossible at that point.
Thankfully, I still had a lot of good friends in Brisbane to pass the holidays with. My friends from the Cape York trip arrived in Brisbane only a few days before Christmas. They had brought a few friends along with them from Cairns. And we decided to grab an AirBnB for a few days.
We had a really good time and I was happy to get out of the hostel for a bit. This group was a really fun time and I appreciated the fact that they adopted me for the holidays. I didn’t know a majority of them but they were friendly to me from the start. And that made me feel very welcome.
Lucinda, one of the girls from the group, had grown up in Brisbane and she invited us over to her parent’s house on Christmas for a big dinner. Each of us made something different and we had a big feast. It was really awesome to be in a situation that felt very intimate. It felt that I was surrounded by family. Which is exactly what should be happening on Christmas.
New Years’ was also a good time. To be fair I usually don’t like celebrating NYE super hard. I’d much prefer to have a low key night and wake up the next day refreshed and ready to go on the first day of the year.
We ended up going to a house party somewhere outside of Brisbane. One of Lu’s friends was throwing it. Nothing too crazy. I preferred it over going to a club or something. Fair, I didn’t know most of the people at the party but it was still a good time anyway.
At this point, I was ready to leave Brisbane. I had the itch to get moving again and I wasn’t totally sure where I wanted to go. I floated a few things out there but I knew I had to get going somewhere because I was getting seriously bored. I kind of felt like I was in a rut to be fair. And when you feel like that you need to make a change.