Today was my last day at work for 2008 and I can’t wait to relax with Claire & Hugo over Christmas and New Year.

In the morning, we’re driving from the Gold Coast to Chinchilla to spend Christmas with our respective families and friends. The trip out to Chinchilla could be quite eventful, as it’s the first drive we”ll have taken with Hugo much over an hour.

Belinda has suggested that we leave when Hugo is due for his morning nap and stop in Toowoomba for a break. Due to our distance, the timing of that couldn’t have been much better as we’ll arrive at approximately 11:30AM. After the pit stop is complete, we’ll continue on the second half of the drive. Traffic and driving conditions permitting, we should arrive in Chinchilla no later than 2:45PM – which will give us a little breathing room before we need to feed Hugo again at about 3:00PM.

We’re on a schedule here people, lets hope it unfolds according to plan!

This afternoon Claire, Hugo and I traveled to Brisbane to attend Lucy’s graduation which was held at the Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre. The graduation was from 2:00PM, which meant we’d need to feed Hugo while we were out. Our carefully laid plans became slightly unhinged when we needed to heat up the bottle.

The Brisbane Convention Centre is considered a best of breed facility, which you’d think would mean that they’d have all of the smaller points handled with ease. You can imagine our surprise when we went into the parenting room to fix up Hugo, that they didn’t provide a microwave to heat up a bottle. In lieu of the microwave, they provided a note informing people to go to the cafe inside the centre – a little odd but maybe they had people abusing the microwave. I head over to the cafe and ask them to heat up the bottle in their microwave and was told that they don’t have a microwave. Instead, I’m provided a paper coffee cup with hot water in it – quality.

After managing to get enough heat into the bottle that Hugo would probably drink it, I thought a couple of drinks would be nice. I order a coffee & a strawberry milkshake and they don’t do milkshakes – how many cafes do you know that don’t serve a simple milkshake. Moving on from that, I later ask for some plain potato chips and they have only salt & vinegar and BBQ flavours – a tad limited for such an large conferencing venue. I then notice that they have a Four’N Twenty hot box on the counter – nothing against Four’N Twenty but it seems a tad out of place in this setting.

All this mind you when they have a graduation on, where they conferred approximately 330 graduands. Doing the math on that for a moment would suggest that there was quite comfortably going to be at least 1000 people in the venue and they couldn’t muster a microwave for the obvious families attending, a better range of chips (of all things) and a milk shake from a so called cafe that serves Four n Twenty from a hot box.

The Brisbane Convention Centre itself was well presented, clean and the staff on the floor were polite and helpful. If only they could have got some of the smaller things right, this could have been a very positive review of a top notch facility.