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River Of Data.com |
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Sunday, 9 November, Auckland, NZ to Port Douglas, QLD, AU The flight to Auckland had changed us to the next day, due to the International Date Line, so all of a sudden instead of Saturday morning it was Sunday afternoon. We'll get the day back eventually. While we were waiting in the international transit terminal in Auckland, we got some lamb pies for a snack. The flight on ANZ on to Cairns was equally excellent, with a nice lunch served, and later a snack, as the flight was almost six hours. We arrived in Cairns on time at 105 pm, When we arrived and went through customs there were no problems, but then we had to get scanned for agricultural inspection. The officer asked us if we had any food, and we said no. Well, he wanted to go through our bags, since he'd apparently seen something on the x-ray. He found that we had some small, one ounce packets of trail mix that we'd completely forgotten about. We were quite sternly reprimanded, and after reading the extremely fine print on the packets, decided we could keep them, but let us know firmly that Australia took agricultural inspection extremely seriously, and that he could have fined us on the spot. But since we were first timers to Australia, and since he believed we'd really not rememberd them in the bottom of a giant suitcase, he let us off. It took a while to get the car, but we finally found our Camry in the lot, where the temperature was over 90F, about 33C. Gail felt the heat in particular. We then drove north to Port Douglas, some 70km, with Gail only having a half dozen heart attacks. She particularly hated all of the roundabouts, since we don't have any at home and she's not used to them. She also kept thinking that I was driving too far to the left and was going to go off the road, though I wasn't closer to the fog line than a foot on the fairly narrow road that twisted along steep hills with tight curves along the ocean front. It wasn't a lot of fun that first day, with Gail freaking out and me trying to be extra careful, since I'd never driven on the left side of the road before. It was several days before I got used to getting into the car on the right side to drive it. But we survived, checked into our room at the Sheraton Resort, ordered room service, spent a bit of time trying to understand cricket on the TV, and went to sleep. It had been a very long day. |
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