Australia - Day 1 and 2 - Travel Days

20th and 21st December, 2008.

The travel day(s) was pretty normal.  No big adventures, no problems to overcome except lack of sleep, and no worries, mate.  (See, I'm picking up this Australian language pretty quickly.)  The only somewhat exciting thing happened at the Kuala Lumpur airport.  We had to wait about four hours.  We were flying overnight to Australia from there, so we thought we'd get David to sleep for a bit.  Yeah, right!  (See below.)  The chairs weren't comfortable enough, so he didn't sleep very much.  (None at all...)  So I set him up with some kid-friendly games from CBC on my laptop.  (See below.)  This worked great.  David got the "friendly kid eye" of one of the other kids waiting in the terminal, so David invited him over to play.  And a new friendship was born in a matter of minutes.  This kept both kids occupied for about an hour.  (Translation:  This kept both sets of parents happy for about an hour.)  At one point, I looked over at David and he said, "I just made a new friend at the airport!"  As parents, Devin and I shared a smile.  It may sound corny, but our plan of living as "citizens of the world" seemed to be working, as David thought nothing of playing with a Muslim boy from Malaysia, on our way from Thailand to Australia to celebrate our family Christmas.  It's a small world indeed.

The flight itself was uneventful, as David slept most of the way.  We flew overnight to Australia and arrived right on schedule at 9:00 AM on Sunday.

Upon arrival, we found an ATM that worked (unlike our trip to Bali last October when it took us a few days to get a cash machine to open its vault) and grabbed a taxi to our hotel.  And our very own version of "It's a small world" played on.  The taxi driver happened to be a family friend of a SCUBA buddy of Lowell's living near Puget Sound.  This friend grew up in a small mining town, Mount Isa, in the middle of nowhere in Australia.  What are the chances that a retired friend would be the driver of our taxi?  Weird indeed.

Our first day at the hotel was pretty uneventful.  We all took a much needed nap, played at the pool, had dinner and went to bed early.  Lowell had some diving to look forward to.  Devin had more rest and relaxation while David played at the kid's club on her agenda.

I'll give more reports later.  And I promise there will be more pictures than today.

Two pictures from the first day are below.  Click on a picture to see a larger version.

Our attempt to get David to sleep in the terminal in Kuala Lumpur...not very successful.	But playing some online kids games...peace for mom and dad.