Day 11 - In transit

A late night packing, and an early morning flight brought us to our final morning in Melbourne. I grabbed a final coffee from Steve’s great Saeco espresso maker (which is actually the Starbucks Barista), and we headed for the airport.

No real incidents to report, except that we got lost on the way to the gas station that was right beside the airport.

We sat, waiting, I had a hideously overpriced coffee in the airport, and before we knew it, we were up in the air, on the way to Alice Springs.

The flight was a quick up and downer, and we basically slept through the whole thing.

We got out onto the tarmac, and got hit with a blast of HOT air. You could definitely feel the intensity of the sun had risen since we left Melbourne. The other thing I noticed was that there were a ton of scattered clouds, and they appeared really low to the group. Perhaps this was the effect of being able to see so far into the distance from the flat land. I was too lazy to pop out my camera (bad me) so I can’t show you.

So we headed into the terminal, and just made some token calls to the family back home, as we waited for our connecting flight a few hours later that would take us into to Ayers Rock. While we waited, we went into the local shop, and looked for hats. (Since I had lost my dad’s tilley hat on the bus back from the penguin parade, we knew that both of us would need some coverage for the desert). The only hats on the rack were some higher end outback hats, made of some special cowhide or something. Cost was something like $50 each, but we really didn’t have much of a choice, so we went ahead and bought them.
Linda walked off to the bathroom around the corner, and came running back, telling me she had found cheaper hats at the store next door (which looked like a convenience store, so we hadn’t bothered checking to begin with). Given the price difference ($10 vs $50), we figured we had to make the switch. So I went back into the store that we had just bought the hats from, and told the lady I wanted a refund. She gave me the dirtiest look ever, and then silently went about giving me my refund. I think it may have been the first time ever, that someone has returned an item at that airport.

Anyways, onto the plane, and we headed on another short 1 hour flight to Ayers Rock. We met the tour guide for our group Sahara Tours, and he drove us back to the campgrounds for our first taste of outback adventure…

to be continued….

Hiatus over

OK - put to shame by the fact that Denise and Julie are already back from their tour of Australia, and have a full blog and pictures up, I am reinspired to bring you the last 2 weeks of Linda and my trip in January. I'll have at least something up tonight. That's a promise.