Our Travel Day from Down Under, Way Down Under

Our day of travel from Fiji back to Australia was long. Unbelievably long. Almost unbearably long. Before it was over John and I both said that maybe we should just fly back to Melbourne instead of continuing up to Cairns and the Great Barrier Reef. Let me explain...Jenny rudely woke up John at 2am in the morning and made him change rooms because the air conditioning wasn't working in our hotel room. At that time Jenny was informed that our flight to Cairns via Sydney had been delayed two hours and that we wouldn't have to leave as early as planned. However, John woke up at 6 am to check the status of the flight and found that it had been delayed 6 1/2 hours, he then tried to get us onto the flight to Brisbane which left at 8:15 while Jenny woke up all of the kids, ran down to get our clothes from the laundry, packed up the bags and got us ready to go. Amazingly we were able to get to the airport, return the car and finagle our way onto the overbooked flight which got us to Brisbane at 10:30. We were thrilled until we learned that we couldn't get onto a flight to Cairns until 8:45 pm. So we spent the entire day at the Brisbane airport. It was awesome. The only highlight was watching the St. Kilda Saints beat the Geelong Cats in Australian Rules Football while we waited in the Qantas Club.

Here is John waiting in line at the Nadi Airport in Fiji and pictures of the kids playing on the floor while we waited. They were very tired.

And here we are in the Qantas Club. Bella finally fell asleep 20 minutes before we boarded the plane, where we then sat on the tarmac for over an hour because a man checked his luggage but didn't board the plane which required the baggage handlers to unload all the luggage to find his bag (we were thrilled). We finally arrived in Port Douglas at 12:30 am and taking into consideration the time difference we had been awake for almost 24 hours. We were exhausted.