The Hughes Zoo

The last three days at sea between Fiji and Sydney were pretty laid back. We spruced ourselves up for formal night and had a bunch of photos taken and Ange managed to disappear to quilling for an afternoon. That’s pretty much it, other than trying to relax and chill. Ange and I went through a few bottles of wine to assist with that.

A couple of days out I tried to book a hire care for the Sydney-Canberra trip. Every damn stationwagon or 4WD in Sydney was booked. We decided to go by train, which was cheaper than the hire car, more fun, and (most importantly) actually available.

We spent the last day or so saying goodbye to the staff and our neighbors (who strangely, live in the suburb in Melbourne we had our eyes on) and generally getting ourselves organised. Jeremy woke us all up at 5:30am on Saturday morning, but we could hardly be annoyed because it meant we got to see the ship come into the Harbour. There was a slight delay disembarking, but that was nothing compared to the trip to Central.

First up, I’d mis-read the CityRail map and thought there was a station near the Convention Centre, but it was actually a monorail stop. The ever-so-helpful Information guys didn’t bother to tell us that the monorail goes to Central, instead they sent us to Town Hall. Now, Will’s in the pram, Jeremy’s on the BuggyBoard behind, Ange is pushing that with a backpack on, I’m dragging a suitecase in each hand with stuff tied to both and have my camera bag on my back. Walking up the friggin hill to Town Hall, just to find out that the construction work has closed off the disabled (and hence pram) access was, well.. we weren’t happy. Given we were already on George St we decided, what the hell, and just walked the rest of the way to Central. I say “just walked”, but I mean dragged and moaned and cursed and sooked and whinged. And that was just me.

And then the fun started. He helpful guys in the CountryLink baggage check kindly informed us they wouldn’t take bags over 20kg or under 5kg, which is pretty damn useless. They didn’t bother to tell us for quite some time that the carriages have a fairly large self-load storage area. Bah. Anyway, once we were all loaded on, the trip was actually pretty pleasant. We were right at the front of the carriage and had a bit of extra room for the boys to play. Both boys had a sleep, and despite it being almost 5 hours we came out if it fairly unscathed.

Both our phones had flat batteries, so we weren’t able to call ahead as planned and book a wagon taxi. Ange grabbed one of the regular taxi drivers and got him to order us a wagon and it turned up surprising quickly. The next surprise was that we had a genuinely helpful and friendly driver, to the degree that Ange tipped him.

It’s good to be back at home and we’re all settling back into normal life. After close to 40 days away, we’re exhausted but happy, so I guess that makes it a good holiday

Tags: at sea, cruise

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 24th, 2009 at 11:32 pm and is filed under cruise. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.