Where good looks count: Clear Mountain Lodge, Brisbane

Here's a little tale about a lodge on Brisbane's far northern fringe, near Samford. So I played down the arguments about the GPS, but it truly was a grim, bleak drive up to the lodge. Well worth it, really.

IT IS a cold and windy night, the night we head to Clear Mountain Lodge, a small hotel about 35 minutes' drive north of the Brisbane city centre.

The lodge is, unsurprisingly, at the top of lonely Clear Mountain, in Brisbane's little-known hinterland. In the dark of night, having been unceremoniously stranded in Queensland thanks to Chilean volcanic ash clouds, the lodge could be on the moon, for all I can see.

Thank goodness for the GPS, the neo-tech husband says. I'll switch off my Walkman so I can hear you call me antediluvian but I just don't trust them. So we argue all the way to Clear Mountain, before calling the hotel to check its location.

"Just drive to the top of the hill. You can't miss it," the receptionist says. "Don't follow the GPS and go on Old School Road. It'll send you down a four-wheel-drive track through a forest." Tres Wolf Creek.

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