After having a bit of a chat with our hosts for the last couple of days (Bruce and Robyn), we bid Ballina farewell and started on the final leg of our journey north to Brisbane.
We had a fair bit of time up our sleeve so I made what I thought would be a quick detour to Byron Bay first.
Big mistake.
Wikipedia has the population of Byron Bay at 9,246. At a zero on to the end of that and that's how many people were either in, or traveling to Byron Bay today. I had forgotten that today was the day before the longest of long weekends. It seems many people were looking to extend the long weekend out by a couple of days. Everyone does it, tries to do it, or wants to do it. It felt as though Byron Bay was the target of all these early holiday makers. After a half hour of crawling around town, seeing no parking spaces free and getting slightly frustrated, I said Bugger This and got back to the Highway leading in to Brisbane.
From there the trip to the centre of the CBD in Brisbane was actually quite smooth (compared to Sydney and Melbourne, anyway), with not a lot of traffic the way we were heading. The highway leading out from Brisbane painted a very different picture.
Thousands upon thousands of these early holiday makers stuck in a traffic snarl that stretched for, I reckon, about 20 kilometres. The mass exodus out of Brisbane was quite astounding. Many of us in the sound see Queensland and its capital as a holiday destination, forgetting that those living there cannot wait to leave to rest and relax somewhere else.
The central Brisbane road system makes absolutely no sense. No logical grid formations, as in Melbourne. It feels as though many factors contributed to their layout and that planning was not one of them.
Today marks a change over from phase one of our holiday - the long amble from home to Brisbane, to phase two of our holiday - the primary purpose of Brisbane as the road trip destination; the 2019 Australian Band Championships. More more on that tomorrow.
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