Family, Cool Stuff and Assorted Geekery; the finer things in life. Updated when I have something interesting to write :)
The holiday was a fantastic. Australia is a brilliant place and we barely scratched the surface in three weeks. Would recommend it to everyone and we did loads of cool stuff which I could barely touch on here on my blog.
Plus, I managed to burn this into my hand while reaching for hash-browns;
Two flights, 5 hours waiting in an airport and a 1 1/2 hr drive from Cairns to Port Douglas.
When I read it back it doesn’t seem so long at all! We watched Avatar on our IThings, read a lot of ebooks and did whatever we could to kill time. Painless and the girls were very patient.
Up _before_ the crack of dawn in order to get to Uluru for sunrise. The locals had proscribed set areas to view Uluru from so it was pretty crowded at the viewing platform.
It looked spectacular through with the changing dawn colours shown on both Uluru itself and the dawn sky around it.
Travelling day; usual drill. Rouse the troops, get breakfast, try and stay awake and make sure you don’t forget anything important (like a piece of technology. Or a child). All went according to plan thanks to the Overminds’ preternatural organisational abilities and we arrived at Uluru with a minimum of fuss.
The hotel was strange; trying to cater for tourists and their desire for luxuries with the local requirements of minimal impact on the land and resource usage. The room was big but spartan and you really got a sense of being out in the middle of nowhere.
The last major thing to do was cross the Sydney Bridge but before we got to that we tried that whole ‘spontaneous’ thing that people who can’t plan swear by. We booked on a trip to go whale-watching!
A pleasant walk over and back over the bridge gave us some lovely views and we got some great photos. Pretty much the definition of ‘you had to have been there’ though.
Sigh. Got a bad cold and pinged my back the day before. So the combination of sneezing and coughing with a sore throat and a bad back meant I barely slept again. While lying there listening to everyone else sleep I fantasised about how we were going to replace all these lousy body gubbins with cool, efficient machinery in the future. Hey, mentally designing cybernetics out of spite got me through to the morning 🙂
I felt grim so we tried to keep the walking to a minimum. Sydney Aquarium was interesting; the biggest aquarium in the world at one point. It had loads of interesting creatures but the layout would have vexed Theseus. It kind of wound round the huge central tanks in three directions. After a while I felt so bad I decided to let everyone else carry on while I’d go back to the hotel. Actually escaping the place where there were no early exits, single-file winding corridors and a plethora of pram-wielding traffic blockers meant it was not a pleasant experience.
Got back to the hotel while avoiding Soul Hunters and went back to sleep.
A semi-decent nights sleep forward by more eclectic combinations for breakfast (nuts, beans, Egg in Purgatory, blood oranges, mushrooms) was enough to overwhelm the cold I’d developed and we set off to the Sydney Tower.
250m up gave us superb views of the city and interactive monitors dotted around the windows explained what we were seeing. Very cool and made me want to fire up Sim City when we got back.
Circadian rhythms, why must you always thwart me ?!?
Barely any sleep for all of us and a very definitely set alarm meant the holiday outing looked like the cast of a George Romero film.
Still we dined massively on Authentic Australian Breakfast Fare (TM) like pancakes, miso soup and spring rolls and so fortified we sallied forth.
Hopped on an early ferry to Manly. The trip was great and Overmind got some more awesome shots of the bridge and Sydney Opera House.
We got to the hotel by 8AM after some breakfast so there followed some enforced chilling while waited for the room. It was worth the wait though with us getting a great corner room with a view of the Opera House.
Then, we were off.
Continue reading “Mission : Survive ~30 hours without sleep.”
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