Saturday 17 March 2012

As the famous Scottish poet Robbie Burns said “The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men Gang aft agley”

We should be in Cairns or Port Douglas right now getting ready to spend the weekend on the
Great Barrier Reef and Daintree Rainforest. Unfortunately, we spent last night in an airport hotel in Sidney were we started out about 12 hours before. We left Wollongong by shuttle at 11:30am and boarded our plane at 2:30pm in Sidney. The flight on Virgin Australia was completely full, including a professional basketball team scheduled to play on Saturday. Linda and I sat with a couple of guys from Indiana and Ohio on holiday in Oz, like us. We approached the Cairns airport at 4:30 pm (Cairns time), but were “waived off” by the traffic control due to low visibility; so we circled for a while waiting for the weather to clear. (We saw TV in the morning warning about heavy storms moving in from the west!). Finally, the pilot came on and said that we were running low on fuel and needed to go back to Townsville (who knew?) to refuel. The flight took about ½ hour, but after we landed the pilot came on again and told us that there was another change in plans. The Cairns airport was closed as well as the roads from Townsville to Cairns due to bad weather. The basketball team got off, but the rest of us stayed on and headed back to Sydney.

The flight crew was very apologetic and did their best to make us comfortable. They even scrounged around during the refueling to secure some more food and booze to calm a hungry and disappointed group of passengers. Finally we landed in Sydney again at around 10:30pm to deplane and get instructions from the passenger service staff. So they gave us a coupon to spend the night at an airport hotel; and a coupon to get a taxi back to Wollongong in the morning.

Linda and I decided to cancel the trip. We couldn’t get back to Cairns until after 4pm the following day (Saturday) which would only give us one full day on Sunday to take in the attractions. With the weather so threatening, we decided to return to Wollongong (where the weather has been wonderful for the past few days) and try something more local. Its really disappointing to miss out on such a great attraction and Linda put in a lot of effort to make all the arrangements, but there is still a lot of other things to experience under more predictable circumstances. We will see how it all turns out…

Saturday March 17, 2012

We made it back to Wollongong via taxi generously provided by the Virgin Australia company. They gave me a paper credit card; the driver swiped in through his portable card reader and I signed it. Very technical and efficient. I didn’t even look at the cost of the 60+km trip.
So we got back into the apartment, caught up on email and talked about a couple of local trips for tomorrow (and Monday?). There is a “southern highlands” nearby that offers some great views, small village environments and vineyards—how bad could that be?! We decided to rent a car and see what happens. It’s not the Great Barrier Reef but its not another long plane ride and a monsoon either. I will let you know how it works out……