Australia Trip Day 1

I am keeping a log online of our trip, so I thought I'd post it to the blog with a few pictures. It may get long, so feel free to skip over if you get bored! :)
4/6/07 Friday
We left Guam on Thursday evening at 6:30 and arrived in Australia at 11:00pm. The flight was good until the last when Adysen and Allie both experienced ear problems. We are considering Benedryl for the flight home!  We took a taxi to the hotel which was only about a 15 minute drive and were happy to find that our accommodations were very nice. We have a 2 bedroom apartment type setting with plenty of room and plenty of beds. We were tired and slept good, but early bird Allie woke up at her usual time in spite of going to bed late.

We went out to explore Cairns and ate at “La Pizza” for breakfast. It was tasty, but super expensive which seems to be the case with most everything here! We spent about $50 on breakfast and that was with some of us sharing food! We learned that they charge an extra 15% service charge on top of the already expensive prices because it is a holiday weekend. The worst thing is that coffee doesn't appear to be that popular here. The "coffee maker" in our room only warms up water for instant coffee - ick! There is coffee around that you can buy, but it comes in tiny cups for $3.00- 4.00 per cup!! Eek!! I found out what a “flat white” coffee is that is on most coffee menus here. It’s basically regular coffee with steamed milk. It is so interesting how they speak English here, but use their words very differently! We definitely felt like we were in a foreign country at times today!

There is a really neat "lagoon" area about a block from our hotel where we spent several hours today. It is free to play and hang out there. It's amazing to find something here that is free!!

We found that if you eat dinner early, before 6:30, lots of places offer a discount, so we took advantage of that for dinner and we had a great dinner - the seafood is wonderful here! Kelsey and I split a macadamia crusted trout that was SOOOOOOOOOO good and Jason had some good tuna!!! The grocery store was closed today, but we hope to go tomorrow and get some groceries to save a little money on food!

After dinner, we visited the “Night Market” which was fun. The girls enjoyed shopping and Allie got a new little koala bear that she named “Cubby”. After that, we enjoyed some Yummy Gelato on the Esplanade. The Esplanade is an area that is runs along side the bay and is filled with shops and restaurants. Our hotel is right off this area which makes everything very convenient and close.

Tomorrow we are going to take a tour to the Daintree Rainforest and to a crocodile Farm, so we look forward to more adventures!!