March 4, 2011
Surf Sessions = 16
Km Driven (irrelevant now!)
OK, long day today....ugh! Sleep at the backpacker we stayed at last night was fair to middlin'. A bunch of 20-somethings stayed up fairly late and were fairly noisy. Add that to the need to leave the place by 5:00 AM to get to the airport and this made for a tiring start. We got to the Auckland Airport on time and had to haggle our way through the check-in. We had 5 kilos too much weight in one bag so there was a mad dash to redistribute it throughout our carry-on bags; the 5 extra kilos would've cost us $100 USD extra! We got 3.8 kilos out of our bags and the check-in agent just said to move on. The next hurdle was airport security, which was no hurdle at all. Maia still remembers that she has to take her shoes off to get past the screener in the USA...the security agent told her to keep them on and said,"You're not in the States little girl!" We finally boarded the plane which then proceeded to drive all over the runway...I was beginning to think we were going to drive the plane to Australia from NZ;>
We got to Sydney a few hours later and then went through customs which was also a breeze (customs agent looked at our declaration sheet and just said," Go to Australia and do not stop!"...now that was just plain funny!) and then spent the next 6 hours hanging around the Sydney Airport waiting for our flight to the Sunshine Coast about 500 miles north. We finally got to the Maroochydore (Ma-roo-chee-door) Airport (also known as the Sunshine Coast Airport) and was greeted by our friends waving a large beach towel with the American flag printed on it! Apparently there was a downpour ensuing outside the airport and our friend was using the towel as protection from the rain but then they realized how funny this was. Peter and Jill Hofman and Phil and Beth Bailey met us at the airport. They are friends of ours from our 2008 Indonesia short-term work trip. We got distributed amongst our friends for a drive back to Peter and Jill's, who are kindly putting us up for the duration of our stay in the Sunshine Coast (3 weeks...boy they do not know what they are getting into!). We emptied the cars of all of our "stuff" and promptly headed to Jill's favorite dog-walk beach...and it continued to rain (this all adds to the torrents of rain the Queensland coast has received for the last 2 months and the recent cyclone Yasi that ripped through Cairns in northern Queensland only a couple of weeks earlier).
All's well in a day that ends on a beach:)
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