Though we haven’t said it out loud to many people until recently, our move to Australia has been in the works for years (very fortunately, because it took two years to get my partner visa!). In that time, the people we have told often had questions about why I would want to move “so far away.”
The grimly ironic situation now is that no one questions our decision to move – many are frankly envious.
But, even before COVID, there were plenty of good reasons to move to Australia.
After a lot of travel in the autumn of 2017, we spent a quiet winter break at home, with a week of being full-time parents while Mitchell’s mother had a well-deserved vacation of her own.
Mitchell and I went on a day trip to San Francisco, where he experienced “snow” for the first time at the Academy of Science, and Lindsay and her sister taught him how to climb a tree.
This was our second trip to Australia – we went three Christmases in a row. The tickets had been paid for before we realized I had breast cancer, and, as it turned out, the trip was an important respite between surgery and chemotherapy.
I only learned for sure that I would have to have chemo the day we landed in Sydney. Knowing that we would be returning to months of hellish treatment, we decided to have as much fun as we could during our vacation!
While visiting Uluru, we did something that was a first for both of us: took a ride in a helicopter.
Like everything else at Uluru/Kata Tjuta, the ride was easy to arrange: we went to the tourist office at the central square, booked it, and charged it to our hotel (we later settled the bill for everything when we checked out).
The views were, of course, stunning – but the ride itself was also a lot of fun. I want to do that again!
The red desert was surprisingly green; it has received an unusual amount of rain for the last four years.
Early January is off-season in Port Douglas, and we soon learned why: we arrived to tropical rain like I hadn’t seen in years (possibly decades).
Leaving the hotel for a walk without umbrellas was a mistake, as very quickly became clear: we were drenched to the skin ten minutes out. In the warm, tropical evening that was no hardship (until we got inside the air-conditioned grocery store).
Port Douglas is a small town without a lot of excitements to offer in the evening (not that we particularly wanted any). No, we did not go see the cane toad racing and, more disappointingly, we never managed to get to this pie shop while it was open:
Brendan did manage to find some of his favorite treats at the supermarket:
Beach swimming is not attractive during the rainy season, mostly because of the stinging jellyfish. This patch of surf was cordoned off with a boom and net to keep them out, but didn’t look particularly nice anyway; we stuck to the hotel pool.
Our main reason for being in Port Douglas was to explore the nearby Daintree Forest and Great Barrier Reef – more on that later!
