After the big city of Sydney I was not quite sure what to expect from Cairns. I have always assumed it to be one of Australia’s biggest cities. Which in my mind puts it in the same category as Fresno, CA or Little Rock, AR.
Cairns, according to my guide book, has a population of 98,210; Slightly bigger than my home town of Merced.
We left the lovely Grace Hotel fairly early in the morning, heading to the airport using the same limo service we had before. This time however, the driver was different. He hardly said a word to us on the way to the airport, in fact the more I think about it, I can’t remember him saying anything at all. He also had an interesting driving style. We entertained ourselves by counting the number of red lights we zoomed past, and the number of pedestrians that fell over as they jumped back onto the sidewalk.
Once we had arrived at the airport, we left him with a nod of thanks, and entered. My lovely wife and I are both used to flying, and consider ourselves pretty experienced when it comes to security measures at airports. However, nothing had prepared us for Sydney airport.
So we decided to spend our last day checking out one of Sydney’s world famous beaches. We followed everyone’s recommendations and chose to miss Bondi Beach (Far too tacky and not the best beach anyway apparently) and to take the ferry to Manly beach.
I was a little bit skeptical at first. Manly Beach. Sounds a lot like Muscle Beach. Maybe I will stand out… But, then again given that everyone in Australia has 0% body fat and looks like a model, I already stand out. I chose to show Australia the beer gut, and put up with the disbelieving stares shared between me and my lovely wife. You know, the ones where people are saying to themselves “How did he manage to land her?â€.
So last night we were booked on a dinner cruise around Sydney Harbor. We were both looking forward to this, as the harbor really is beautiful.
When we went on our honeymoon a few years ago we had a bad experience with a dinner cruise, so we had made sure to be fairly specific about how we wanted this cruise to be. We made sure we had guaranteed window seating, and did not have to share the table with anyone else.
As we were waiting to board, it became more and more obvious to us that we were to be in for an interesting experience. I don’t wish to sound too posh, but I do wish there was a dress code for this sort of excursion. My lovely wife and I were dolled up to the nines, but we were in line with a group of Korean tourists in t-shits, shorts, flip-flops and plenty of japanese made electronics…
