All posts by Jon

Island Hopping

Travel

So, Sara’s company takes everyone plus family on a holiday every three years or so.  Luckily Sara joined right before this trip was scheduled and we were invited along.  The trip was to the Daydream Island Resort (caution: terrible web site) which is an island among the “Whitsunday Islands” which are off the Queensland coast and near the Great Barrier Reef.

We left early on a Thursday morning from Melbourne and arrived to Hamilton Island Airport before noon.  After collecting our bags, we walked over to the nearby dock for the 30 minute ferry ride to Daydream Island.

After our arrival at the island, we quickly explored the whole of it while waiting for our room to be ready.  It didn’t take long given the island is only 1km long and 300 metres wide.

There was wildlife everywhere – kangaroos and wallabies along with all manner of birdlife. We tried to make friends with the marsupials:IMG_2152

IMG_2150

Sadly, they seemed more interested in eating grass and just pooping everywhere. They are basically Canadian geese that hop around.

We were also told at check in not to leave our balcony door open if we left the room (who does that?) – since cockatoos are quite smart and have been known to raid the mini-bars for various food.  While relaxing in the hot (well… luke warm) tub one day, I actually witnessed a cockatoo fly into a room and a few minutes later fly out with a bag of cashews ($6!) in its mouth.  Luckily we closed our door, as this guy was keen to eat our food:

IMG_2159

While Sara was off in the mornings doing her corporate “team building” things – I hunkered down and read “The Martian” and generally lazed around like this guy:

IMG_2156

It was a good relaxing weekend – we didn’t make it off the island for any excursions, but did get some serious pool / oceanside relaxing in.  We ate way too much food at the various buffets and drank lots of free beer.  Plus the view from our room wasn’t bad.

IMG_2155IMG_2153

 

On Sunday morning it was time to go, and I got a bit of a treat on arrival at the Hamilton Island Airport marina – watching a 737 approach and land very close to us.

2015-10-18 09.40.34

Oh, here we are, enjoying ourselves.

IMG_2168

Milestones

Random Musings

So, this happened:

ZPlus

My Thursday night basketball team won the Premiership (championship) in the B-Grade league.  That means we get promoted up to A-Reserve, with only A-Grade left above that.  Being in a higher grade should yield a better caliber of basketball, which will be nice.  I’m getting tired of the footy mentality of some of the teams we play against that seem to crave unnecessary physical contact.  Crazy to think I started this season shortly after I got here, and it is just now finishing up 6 months later.  Don’t worry, the summer season started the week after the grand final, so I’m already back at it . Our Monday team didn’t make the playoffs, so our goal for the summer season is the get the Monday team up one level.

Another major milestone that occurred:

Car1 Car2

We bought a sweet-ass ride.  This is our 2013 Toyota Yaris 4-door sedan.  As if driving on the wrong side of the car on the wrong side of the road was not challenging enough, we got a 5-speed manual to shift with our left hand.

We made our way onto the bowling green for the first time.  I hope to get to play again soon, because I was terrible.  I either got the right distance, or the right direction, never both.

bowls

Also, since we’ve been here, we’ve been looking for a Victorian number plate (license plate) with our shared initials on it, and we finally found it :

NumberPlate

So we got that going for us, which is nice.