Darling.
On Monday we trekked over to the Darling Harbour area. It is a large Harbour with lots of shops, restaurants and attractions. We passed a park on the way, and Ty wanted to stop to take a picture next to the giant tree.

Fake.
When we walked past the wax museum, Ty kept staring at Ian Thorpe. I asked him if it was real or fake. He couldn’t decide. He kept walking around, looking at him. Finally he said “I think he is fake”. I told him to stand next to Ian so I could take a picture and he did it, but he didn’t move real fast, and he didn’t want to take his eyes off of him. 🙂

Ships.
One of the things Jay was most looking forward to was the Maritime Museum. They have ships that you can explore, including a replica of Captain Cook’s ship that was used to discover Australia. Ty was most impressed about how people go to the bathroom on the ship. They stick their bum out a hole and use rope to wipe. Ew!! Jay was amazed by the fact that the US sunk Captain Cook’s actual ship during the Revolutionary War. The British sent most of their ships to the U.S. To fight. I believe it is sitting on the ocean floor off the coast of Rhode Island. Im not a history buff, so kids, don’t put this statement in a school report without cross checking some references…

In this photo you can see the Maritime Museum’s warship and submarine in the background.

Speed.
The museum has the worlds fastest boat. What is fascinating to me is that the world record was set in 1977, with 1977 technology. How has nobody beat that record since then? Maybe nobody is crazy enough to want to do it. Seems like a really bad idea to go 300mph on water…

Beer.
I have added another trip to our Australian exploration calendar. Next July, I feel like we have to go to Darwin to see the beer can boat regatta. How much fun would that be?!? In the meantime, we will be building a beer can boat for our pool…

Convicts.
So by now we all know that the modern Australia was built by convicts. Let’s not get into the Aboriginal debate right now… I haven’t really given much thought before to the logistics of actually transporting the convicts from England to Australia. The convicts were kept in cells on the ships, but once they got to land, then what? It wasn’t like there were prisons already built. So they were basically free to roam? I always thought the west was wild in the US. It’s got nothing on early days in Australia! Here are some interesting facts.

Lily was fascinated by the museum…

We ate lunch at Margaritaville. I was super excited. I thought that a place with margarita in the name would know how to make one. Unfortunately that wasn’t the case. After sending back the first round, take 2 was somewhat better – at least there was salt on the rim – but I couldn’t finish mine. And my food wasn’t good. Kind of disappointing. What I wouldn’t do for a cheeseburger in paradise…

Moving on…the boys had more exploring to do in the museum, so the girls did some shopping. And then it started to rain a bit, so we headed back to the hotel. Ty wanted to go swimming. Both kids had a blast with Memaw and papa and dad in the pool. So fun!!

Chops.
I was nearly crashing due to not eating my disgustingly lunch, so come dinner time I needed food ASAP. Sherry and the kids were tired, so they stayed in the room. The skies were just about to open up to a torrential downpour, so we wanted to find a place to eat that was close to the hotel. There was a little Japanese restaurant right next door so we popped in there. I had a yummy Mosi soup. I was so hungry that I ate the tofu and seaweed in it and though it was a hundred times more tasty than my lunch. While we were waiting for our main course, we had to give Kirk a lesson in eating with chopsticks. He did pretty good for his first time, but didn’t think he could eat the whole meal with 2 sticks. The waitress was really sweet and brought him a fork. :). Dinner was yummy. As soon as we were finished, I went straight to bed. I still didn’t feel well, I think I was just exhausted.

Garden.
The next day we bought tickets to a hop on, hop off bus. Our first stop was the Botanical Gardens. It was so beautiful and HUGE! We enjoyed walking around there. Interesting fact…one of the ponds in the garden has eels. The eels come from the Harbour. One might wonder how they get to the pond. They slither along the grass… Ewwww! Thank god I didn’t see any.

Hurricanes.
After hopping off near what we think was Chinatown, we couldn’t find any place to eat that looked like it wouldn’t give us food poisoning, so we got back on the bus and went back to Darling Harbour. We knew that Hurrucanes had yummy food, so we ate there. It did not disappoint.

GONG!
Ty loved riding on the top level of the bus. It was pretty cold, but we didn’t let it ruin our fun. I didn’t listen to the headphones and tour guide commentary for the last stretch of the tour, but Memaw kept us in the loop. She must have had her volume cranked because she shouted “GONG! THERE ARE THE CHINESE GARDENS”. It made my day.

Opera.
“Ding! Ding! Ding! Please take your seats as the show will be starting soon.” Sherry and I had great seats for The King and I – front row of the balcony, about 50 meters from the stage. We could see the orchestra pit. The inside of the opera house wasn’t nearly as big as I expected – was really a rather small, intimate theater. It was maybe a third of the size of the Des Moines Civic Center. Small, but so much character and history. The show itself was incredible. The costumes, the set, the talent, the music. All of it was perfection. It is always amazing to me how I can get so caught up in watching a live show. Might sound cheesy, but it really does take me out of my own head and into another place for a couple hours. So much fun. This was something I will always remember. Thank you Sherry!!!!

Storm.
Apparently cabs can’t go right up to the front door of the opera house, so we had to follow the crowd to what we thought was the taxi stand. It was raining, but not too bad, and most of the way was covered. When we finally got to the taxi stand, there was quite a long line. We were almost halfway to the hotel, so we decided to walk. Our umbrellas kept us mostly dry.

Delays.
Apparently the storm that night (either during the show or after we went to sleep) was the worst Sydney had in a while. Heaps of rain caused flooding, power outages, traffic jams, airport shutdown, an all around mess. We were pleasantly surprised to find out that while many flights were cancelled, ours was on time. But our cab driver was not on time. I was trying not to stress and just roll with it. We finally got to the airport, and holy cow. I haven’t seen that many people in a line at the airport. We used the little machines to check in, printed our boarding passes and bag tags. Because we had to check the stroller, we realized I had to get in line to get a bag tag printed for the oversize luggage drop off. I sent everyone else off to drop off our checked bags and go to the gate. I hopped in the relatively short Service line and made my way to the front fairly quickly. Jay called when I was next in line and said that there wasn’t a place to drop bags off….that even though we already had our bag tags, we had to stand in the enormous queue to check them. What the heck?!?! That doesn’t make any sense… When I got to the counter I asked if my family could come check in at this line. It was technically reserved for people whose flights were boarding soon, and ours was getting close. So we got in line again and were nearly to the front when our Jetstar agent (and over half of the others) decided to leave their desk and apparently go for tea. WTF?!?!? There are literally hundreds of people that need to get through that line, and they aren’t going to be able to do so unless there are agents to take their tickets and bags (still can’t believe they didn’t have a separate baggage drop area), so why the heck could they just leave without a backup?!?! I was floored. At that point it turned into chaos. People were getting stressed out. The Jetstar employees that remained were just shouting out the names of flights that were about to take off and people had to shove their way to the front of the lines of they were on those flights. It was a disaster. A colossal failure in Jetstars part, in my opinion, to deal with the situation. However, by some miracle, we were able to get on the plane. And we made it to Hamilton Island for the “stress free” part of our vacation.

Cluster.
Oh wait? Did I say stress free? Ha!!! Isn’t that funny. Let me tell you a funny story…
So we land on Hamilton Island, which is incredibly beautiful and WARM!! We are smiling! Hooray! We get our bags from the little tram (with only 1 or 2 flights per day, it isn’t necessary to have a full on baggage claim). All of our bags arrived. Hooray! Now to find out ride to our holiday home… There is supposed to be someone there to meet us with our name on a sign. Seeing nobody, Jay starts wandering around. He finds out that a place called Immaculate is supposed to pick us up. He finds a girl from Immaculate (who has a full buggy) and she says, “I don’t have you on my list for today.” Um………. Ok. Well we have about 50 confirmations saying that we are arriving today, so you best get this sorted ASAP. She went to drop off her group of people, Jay tried calling the booking agent who of course didn’t answer her phone, and we waited. There are no cabs on the island – basically only buggy traffic. And because there are limited flights, the airport basically shuts down. So we were basically stuck…

And then our ride arrived…

No, that is not an optical illusion. Yes, they thought that 6 people and 8 bags would fit in this poor excuse for a van. Um. No. Try again. Then she tells us that the house we rented doesn’t come with a buggy – but we were certain it did. But the buggy hire place at the airport was already closed, so Jay and Ty rode in the clown car to another buggy hire (rental) place while the rest of us waited at the airport for a proper van. One finally showed up, but couldn’t take us to the house because they were all doing a mad scramble clean – turns out they weren’t expecting us until the next day. She dumped Sherry, Lily and I off at the marina and took Kirk over to help Jay with the buggy.

But hey. At least we weren’t stuck in Fargo in December.
And Lily didn’t seem to mind.

We tried to make the most of it by going to the pharmacy, and we got a giant plate of fresh prawns and coleslaw – which were delicious. We walked through a few of the little shops. I bought some wooden fish to hang from the buggy so we know which one is ours – there are about 5,000 white buggies rolling around this island.

Sunset.
We finally got the green light to go to the house around 5:30. It really is a beautiful home. The view from our deck, and the birds that like to try to steal our food.

After a quick walk through, we all went back down to the Main Street to pick up a few groceries. On our way, we stopped at a place on top of the hill to watch the sun set. There was a little bar set up, which sold amazing margaritas, and the view was unbelievable.

Reef.
As much as Wednesday sucked, Thursday was awesome. We got up and headed down to the marina to catch our boat to the Great Barrier Reef. Ty and I popped our motion sickness meds (thank goodness). The ride to the reef was about 2 hours, 40 minutes of which were pretty rough. But we powered through it and arrived at the reef puke-free. Woohoo!! The pontoon that we parked at had all of the things that the place we went to in Port Douglas had, only if seemed nicer. Possibly because it was a smaller boat and less crowded. Jay and his parents got their wetsuits and snorkel gear on right away and went out to explore the reef. I took the kids back in the boat to eat lunch (which was delicious). Then we went down to the underwater observatory. So cool.

Next up was the partially submersible boat ride. We climbed in and got to see the reef and lots of fish without getting wet. Ty and Lily really liked that. When we got back to the pontoon, Jay and his parents had come ashore, so I put on a wetsuit and jumped in. I saw a giant Maori Wrasse – Google the images. So cool.

It was almost time to head back to shore, so we got back on the boat. This is when I should had popped another pill… That 40 minute stretch of ocean that I thought was rough on the way out was miserable on the way back. Ty was the first person on the boat to puke. And it wasn’t long before half the people on the boat were either puking or going to the back of the boat for fresh air. By some miracle I didn’t puke. But we all were relieved when we got back to the smooth waters protected by the islands. Lesson learned…always take a pill!!!

Sherry was worn out when we got home, so she stayed at the house with Lily while the boys and I went out for dinner. Ty had made a joke while we were on the boat that he was going to eat some squid. He didn’t realize that you can actually order it at restaurants, so we teased him all day about getting squid for dinner. He was laughing, but I think he started to get really nervous.
Unfortunately all of the restaurants were fully booked, so we went to the tavern. They aren’t licensed for takeaway, so we had to stalk a table, and there was about a 40 minute wait for food. Jay asked Ty what he wanted – he said grilled cheese or chicken nuggets. Jay said, “ok, so squid?” When the food arrived….oh. My. Goodness. It was SOooooooo yummy! I got a pesto pasta that was so creamy and good. I got a side salad and it had the option of some extras…including calamari!! I have to say that I was proud of Ty, my incredibly picky eater, because he tried a bite of squid. He may have spit it out right away, but he tried. Everyone had a delicious dinner. Yay!!

Ty twisted our arms and talked us into getting ice cream after dinner, and then we called it a night.

Sunset day 2

Today is Friday and we don’t really have any plans. We are going to explore the island and go to the beach. Should be a pleasant day. Hope all is well!! G’day mates!