Brisbane was quite possibly our favourite city in Australia. We were lucky with the weather, not breezy in fact – with beautiful sunny days (I hear they have a lot of them) and our accommodation – a truly enormous apartment with a balcony well situated in the West End part of town.

It was so nice in fact we decided to host dragon boating friend Amy for dinner (with leftover steak from Mort & Co!). She kindly brought us very tasty red wine from 19 Crimes with interactive labels which you could click via an app and hear about convicts’ personal stories, now one of our favourite wines from Australia.

From what we could see, the city had the right balance of edgy and straight. We could walk one way from our apartment down Boundary Street to see great street art and hippie cafes and bookshops ‘Where the Wild Things Are’, the other had more business orientated high rise buildings. Down Fish Lane we found more street art and some hip bars and restaurants, leading to the river and museums.

GoMA (Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art) was so great we actually went twice, and I returned a third time at night to experience James Turrell’s ‘Night Life’ – a subtlety shifting light piece on the building’s façade. Sadly of course all those photos are lost (on my phone that fell into the Picton marina in New Zealand) so you will have to make do with some of Tom’s pictures of graffiti / cool street art instead.

The girls enjoyed designing some paper jewellery in the Island Fashion kids zone and we all appreciated the curated thematic contemporary displays including standout pieces by Daniel Crooks, Martin Creed and others.

We also visited neighbouring Queensland Museum of Art, glad to find Dale Harding’s wall piece, and encouraging the girls to sketch what they see.

With the sun out we couldn’t stay indoors for long, so had a picnic lunch by the river, followed by some playground time (and as usual a nap for Tom and a coffee for me!) and a swim at the South Bank beach and series of outdoor swimming pools. You could easily forget you were in the middle of a major metropolis.

From there it was easy to jump on the City Cat ferry down the river, getting out first at New Farm to look around the Brisbane Powerhouse arts space and then to Hamilton to visit the Eat Streets Market for dinner.

The river banks on both sides are stunning – I had been on an incredible run that morning over Story Bridge, round Kangaroo Point and Cliffs Park and back over Goodwill Bridge through the Botanical Gardens.

We saw the sunset listening to live music and eating delicious street food, thinking this city gets things right.