getting to Cairns, Australia (and a little of Auckland)

Until this point most of our travels have been on long weekends and public holidays.  We recently took  a couple of weeks off and did some vacation time.   You have been warned.  Multiple pix coming up and lots of vacay bragging.

Our 1st trip to was to Oz.  Visiting Australia is kinda like visiting Canada.  You either need a vast amount of time and money to see all of it or just pick one spot and enjoy that.   We did the latter.  We went to Cairns which is a tourist town on the east coast and is a short boat ride to the Great Barrier Reef.  It also has easy access to the Daintree rainforest and coast.

But...  I could not get any good cheap flights to Cairns (and where there are 6 of us cheap is a necessity).  We ended up leaving Christchurch at O'dark thirty to fly to Auckland and our flight that night did not leave until 8pm.  So we put our luggage in storage at the airport (could not check it straight through... international vs domestic etc etc arghhh) and took the airport bus into the city centre and toured around Auckland a bit.

 One thing I have found funny here is that (as at home) most of the family prices, such as for the bus, are for families with 2-3 kids and Adrian is considered an adult at 15.  But whenever we try to hash out how to pay for everyone I hear this...  "oh well we will just give you the family rate anyway, have a good day"  Not so much when we were in Oz but it has happened quite a few times in NZ.

Where I was going with this, is that the lady who sold us the bus tickets gave us a family pass and did not charge us extra for the spare kids. 

The end of the line for the bus is the harbour downtown.  When we got there, there was a Maori festival and Haka demonstrations.  We toured that a bit, I got Matt a fish hook piece of pounami which the Maori carver told me was a good choice, as we had 4 kids, he must be a good provider and that is important for a man. (Remember that Matt, keep me in the lifestyle to which I have become accustomed!  There were also lots of food venders and we were all pretty hungry at that time, so that was good (it was only 10am but we got up at 4).

We then wandered around downtown taking in the sites and Luke kept getting progressively more anxious about us missing the bus and our plane. He REALLY wanted to go to Australia.

A Segway!   I had to take his pix, he works for tourism and did not mind at all. 

We went for ice cream and the Sky Tower started to grow out of Adrian's head, Weird. 

Flat Malachi came along for the ride but did spend most of the trip in the bottom of the beach bag.  

Mea Culpa.  The structure behind is where the festival was.  It is called "The Cloud" and was built when New Zealand hosted the World Cup. 

Farther down is a pix of the boat that won. 

It was a bit of a nasty day, threatening to rain (but never did, whew) but we had fun wandering around and seeing some sights.   Finally (to Luke's great relief) we headed back to the airport and checked our bags and had some supper.

Then...  a bit of a glitch occured (all my fault).  When I booked our flights we were told we did not need visas, BUT Canadians (not New Zealanders) need visas to visit Australia.  I really should have checked this but it just did not occur to my little mind.  Thank goodness all I had to do was whip over to the Quantas desk and pay $30 per person to take care of this.  I just about lost it in the airport.  Matt thought I was ready to snap.
But sometimes good things follow bad.  The "big" family thing happened again (they like big families here, can you tell) and the agent thought it was terrible that we would have to pay so much,  and only charged me for mine and Matt's visas.  Did the 4 kids for free!!  Wow.

One thing about the Auckland airport, once you get through security, they have one of the nicest duty free areas I have ever seen.  We did a little shopping (I got an adapter to let me download my pix directly to my ipad, turned out to be a very good purchase, more on this later) had a coffee and a beer and all was good.

After popping a few valium (kidding people) we finally did get on our late night plane.  The flight was uneventful.  We take up an entire row so Jamie got to stretch out over Adrian and I and kick or head butt the two of us the entire way.

Once we landed, the air temp in Cairns at 11pm was 24C.  Nice,  Adrian was melting.   We managed (finally) to get a maxicab,  there was a big footie (rugby) game in town and the taxi service was pretty busy.   Once we got to our hotel we put the kids to bed and had a bit of duty free booze and went nighty nite ourselves.