Click to Zoom Can you see a New Years card here?

This was our last morning in Cairns.   We had our "regular" breakfast at the sidewalk cafe and said goodbye to our two friends there.  We packed up the backpacks and got permission for a later than normal check-out. We headed up into town a bit to look for the Quanta's office to make reservations for Andrew and I to New Zealand.  We won't buy the tickets till we hook back up with him and make sure plans haven't changed any.  We saw a part of town we had just not had time to explore!  We then went to the Pier Market to have our pictures taken.  We had quite a conversation with the photographer there.  He'd had a crowd around yesterday.  He has some good equipment but was fascinated by Rusty's digital camera and what it could do (at an expense far less than his)!  He had some interesting props such as a cardboard bust of Crocodile Dundee, two birds, a stuffed croc' etc.  One thing that has not fit into our schedule at all has been shopping.  We'd like to but it doesn't work to the top of the list with other options.  Another problem would be what to do with what we buy.  We are traveling with only our backpacks and they are pretty loaded.  Rus watched as they weighed them today and he's packing 27 kilos (60 pounds)!!  I read a rather interesting article in the Quanta's flight magazine on the last flight.  It compared being a "traveler" to being a "tourist" - I think we've used a little of both approaches. We caught a taxi to the airport.  It takes about two minutes from the time you call till they are parked outside.  It's so easy to get anywhere you want to here without a car!  We'd just be stranded at home!!

Click to Zoom Leaving Cairns

When the lady at the Quantas counter checked us in this morning she said, "my, we have a long flight today."  We fly from Cairns to Sydney, then to Melbourne and finally on to Hobart.  We arrive about 9:00 p.m.  We've been spending our airtime reading about Tasmania and making plans.  On the way to Sydney the movie was "Picture Perfect". When we are at a terminal we find a plug and juice up the computer battery while doing a little e-mail.  All in all, flying time passes pretty quickly. In Melbourne our flight was delayed about 15 minutes so we ran back down to the central area.  They had a computer expo in the airport and free internet access.   We both logged on to the web site so we could check it.  We never really get to see what's working and what's not.  We found some missing links to pictures that will need to be added.  We were each trying to check different pages as quickly as we could.  We saw that the site had been checked 203 times.