Australia trip - VF

We had been planning to visit Australia again for the last 8-10 months. Initially Jamie was going to go to a conference in Sydney, but 1) he didn't need the CME points and 2) he could only take 2 weeks and not the 3 weeks we were planning to go for if the conference was to be; so on 24th June we headed off for a restful holiday (vacation). People tell us we won't be having too many restful holidays for the next couple of decades (see the anouncement in our June posting below....) so we wanted to make the most of this one. Jamie's mom came with us for most of the time and we also met up with Jamie's best friend Chad from school days and my friend Maria (we have been best friends since we were 4 years old!) for the first week or so.

So first of all we flew straight to Cairns for a full week of sunshine (or so we thought - we had a few overcast days to start with, but that soon changed). We stayed in Palm Cove, where the Smith Family has had some previous memorable holidays. Palm Cove is more stylee and resort-like than Cairns itself, although not so full-on as Port Douglas appears to be. Jamie & I enjoyed lots of lying about reading time, whilst Chad and Maria preferred the more action-packed days of beaching and swimming-pooling. Our place of abode was the penthouse suite at Villa Paradiso which was right across the road from the beach - not good if you don't like surf noise, but we found it to be a fabulous way to get to sleep (think of those old new-age music tapes of wave sounds!). We had some very cool excursions including a river cruise to see the local fauna, a gondola trip up across the mountains to the rainforest, a visit to the tropical zoo and of course the highlight was snorkelling on the Great Barrier Reef. Had the weather initially been brighter, we were planning to do a couple of different reef trips, but at least we got out there on our 2nd to last day for what was apparently the best day they had had on the reef for a couple of months.

After Palm Cove, we headed to Sydney where Maria left us and after zipping up and across the Harbour Bridge with Jamie and Joan on 4th July, so did Chad. We stayed at the Meriton World Tower (click on the link and scroll down to see the view!!) - an amazingly tall building where we were fortunate to be on about the 64th floor. In addition to the obligatory walk around Circular Quay to the Opera House, we also did a tour out the the Blue Mountains, a harbour cruise, visited Darling Harbour, the historic 'Rocks' area and the Queen Victoria Building as well as shopping in various locations. We also got to catch up with my sister Rebecca and her husband Jeremy as well as my mother who was in Sydney for 3 weeks and most of the Butler/Florida clan.

After Jamie and Joan left, it was very exciting to welcome our new nephew 'Oskar' who finally came into the world in the early hours of July 11th. Just as well I had arranged to stay on a couple of days or I would have missed him as he was 12 days overdue! He is very cool.

I will post some pictures of some of the highlights of the journey!